Some people think the claw machine is so hard to win because the stuffed animals are packed so tightly together. But the bigger reason is more insidious than that: the claw machine is programmed to have a strong grip only part of the time.
This isn’t a closely kept secret. It’s publicly available information, pulled straight from the instruction guides for the biggest claw games out there. Open the manual for Black Tie Toys’ Advanced Crane Machine. Look at page eight, section subheading “Claw Strength”:
The machine’s owner can fine-tune the strength of the claw beforehand so that it only has a strong grip a fraction of the time that people play.
The owner can manually adjust the “dropping skill,” as well. That means that on a given number of tries, the claw will drop a prize that it’s grabbed before it delivers it to you.
.. The machines also allow the owner to select a desired level of profit and then automatically adjust the claw strength to make sure that players are only winning a limited number of times: