It was just about one year ago that The New York Lottery retired Sweet Million. It was also about a year ago that they started a new game, Cash4Life.
Sweet Million was retired because it was acording to The NYS Lottery "under-performing". That's because players didn't play it much. Maybe that was because of the fact that The NYS Lottery decided to take 60 percent of the total take for each draw. By doing that, they left a smaller prize pool for Sweet Million's lower tier prizes. (Most games have a 50/50 split between the state and the players. The state keeps half of the take, and the other half of it provides the prize pool money for the players.) IMHO, the smaller (40%) lower tier prize pool was the reason why the lower tier prizes for Sweet Million were so awful. And that's just one reason why players didn't like the game.
Many players also didn't like the game because "Nobody ever wins the jackpot." That isn't a good reason not to play any game, but it was a very valid observation. The reason why there were so few jackpot winners was by The NYS Lottery's own admission, "Sweet Million has a coverage problem." That means very few of it's possible 3.8 million six number combinations were "covered" for each drawing. Not enough tickets were sold with enough different six number combinations to make a jackpot winner likely to happen. For any given drawing, only about 10 percent of the possible 3.8 million combinations were sold (covered), and 90% were not sold. (Those were the "uncovered" combinations) That simply means there was only about a 10% chance there would be a JP winner with any given drawing, and a 90% chance there would NOT be a JP winner.
If you look at C4L prize payout pages on The NYS Lottery's website, you'll notice there have been very few 1st prize winners. There's also been only a few 2nd place winners. That tells me that they aren't selling enough tickets (despite the recent promotions) for players to win a JP or even a second place prize, and that C4L also has "a coverage problem." I have to ask myself, how did The NYS Lottery manage to do something so dumb as to replace one game that had a "a coverage problem" with another game that has the same problem? In The NYS Lottery's defense, just like everybody else, they do not have a crystal ball, so they couldn't know how players would react to it. And C4L is a multistate game. New Jersey started it at the same time as NY, and Pennsylvania just announced they are going to offer it. So maybe they thought that would make a difference and that would make players jump all over it.
Stan Rose in his column in Lotto News, has been saying it's time for The NYS Lottery to offer a new more "win-able" game. He's right. Players would love a game where they won prizes more easily, and so would The NYS Lottery, especially when they saw how much money they are making off of it. Money that they surely can't be making off C4L. G5