DRGT brings its 'Player First' approach to G2E: the casino stops being a system and becomes an ecosystem

There is a huge difference between developing technology and bringing it to market, and developing technology that first breaks in a real casino. DR Gaming Technology (DRGT) belongs to the second group, and that detail—which sounds like a marketing nuance—is actually the strongest commercial argument the company has.

The firm returns to booth 4405 at the Venetian Expo for the 2026 edition of G2E Las Vegas with a message worth reading carefully if you operate a gaming floor: its management systems, cashless, player engagement, and jackpots are no longer sold as separate pieces. They work as a single organism.

Here, it is worth dispelling a common misconception. The average operator evaluates cashless as a payment method: convenience for the player, less cash handling, shorter queues at the cage. All of that is true, and all of that is the least important part.

What a cashless system actually delivers is a continuous stream of transactional and behavioral data, attributed to an identified individual, in real time. Who plays, on which machine, for how long, at what betting speed, during which time slot, following which promotion, and up to what point in the session. That is the asset. Payment convenience is just the wrapper.

The latest version of drPlayerApp is already fully operational and incorporates NFC 'tap and play' functionality at the Infiniti sister casinos in Dinant and Oostende, Belgium. The player holds their phone close, accesses their funds, transfers them to their favorite EGM, plays, and cashes out. Meanwhile, they track their own gameplay, monitor their loyalty rewards, and use that balance to order food and beverages, redeem vouchers, book a room, or claim raffle tickets.

This DRGT video summarizes the complete player journey within the ecosystem: access, wallet, EGM gameplay, rewards, and the cashier, all under the same identity and the same balance.

DRGT carries an engineering peculiarity that rarely makes the headlines, yet often decides tenders: its patented drSMIB 'mesh' network allows operations without the need for a permanent on-site server.

Translated to the reality of a medium-sized gaming floor in Latin America, the Caribbean, or Africa: less server room infrastructure, less dedicated cabling, less reliance on a single point of failure, and considerably shorter installation times. For an operation of 150 to 400 machines, that difference is not cosmetic; it is the difference between a project that takes months versus weeks, and between a CAPEX that frightens the committee and one that gets approved.

The company reports a presence in more than 70 countries, over 1,400 sites, and more than 85,000 connected devices. Founded in Belgium in 2003 by Jurgen De Munck and Michiel van Dam as a two-person team, today it exceeds 150 employees with offices in Austria, Belgium, Colombia, Malta, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, and Uruguay. That map matters: four of those nine offices are in Spanish America, which means support in the local time zone and language.

The focus of the trade show will be split between drPlayerApp and drManagementApp, but the development that will most interest a director of operations is another: the new version of drFloorManager and the updates to drRewards, which now bring together the configuration of drJackpots progressive jackpots and drPromotions promotions in a single place.

Configuring bonuses, promotions, and jackpots from different consoles is the silent source of half the campaign errors on a gaming floor: overlapping rules, players eligible twice, and marketing budget leaking away without traceability. Unifying them is an unflashy product decision that is enormously profitable.

"This is where the real value of our ecosystem begins to become evident," explained Marco Herrera, CEO of the company. "Cashless gaming gives the operator transactional data; our system uses that information to drive player recognition, loyalty, bonusing, promotions, and jackpots. Being able to configure all these elements together means the operator can be much more precise about what they offer, to whom, and when."

DRGT will also showcase drCARM, its cash-dispensing and player-information kiosk, along with new developments from its NextGen Apps portfolio. The kiosk resolves a classic bottleneck—the cashier—while simultaneously serving as a touchpoint: balance, points, active promotions, and withdrawals, without human intervention.

At the opposite end of the journey are the access points. Entry control featuring ID scanning, facial recognition, and player cards completes the loop: the customer's session begins to be recorded before they even touch a machine. For regulatory compliance, self-exclusion, and capacity control, this is no longer a luxury and is becoming a requirement in an increasing number of jurisdictions.

The drCARM kiosk brings the same logic to withdrawals: an operator-branded interface, visible cash, promotional, and points balances, and preconfigured amounts. Zero friction, no waiting in line, and every transaction is recorded under the same player identity that powers the rest of the ecosystem.

"Our growth reflects that operators are looking for technology that does more than simply manage a casino," stated Jurgen De Munck, Executive Chairman of DRGT. "They want systems that provide them with better insights, better control, and, above all, a better understanding of their players."

However, the key differentiator lies not in the pitch, but in the methodology. None of this development happens in a laboratory. Through its sister Infiniti casinos in Mexico, Belgium, and France, DRGT deploys, uses, and tests its technology with real players and real transaction volumes before releasing it to the market.

"That is probably one of our greatest advantages," concluded De Munck. "We can put something into a casino, use it, test it, break it, improve it, and test it again. By the time an operator sees it at a trade show, it has already been through a real gaming environment. That gives us confidence and, ultimately, significantly reduces risk for our clients."

Anyone who has ever installed a management system on an active gaming floor knows exactly how much that statement is worth. The real cost of a CMS is not in the license: it lies in the weeks of unbalanced reconciliations, unclosed tickets, and the night shift calling a support team that answers from another time zone. A supplier that inflicts that pain upon itself before selling the product to you is, quite simply, in another category of provider.

I have spent years building progressive jackpot systems for live tables with Jack7.co, and there is one conclusion that repeats itself in every installation: the jackpot is not a prize, it is a behavioral tool. The same applies to everything DRGT is integrating.

When the jackpot, the promotion, and the reward are configured from the same place and fed by real transactional data, you stop firing campaigns blindly into the air and start engineering floor occupancy: filling the dead Tuesday time slot, retaining the mid-tier player who is two visits away from walking over to the competition, and increasing the average spend without raising the bet volume. That is margin, not marketing.

The second point I recommend scrutinizing closely at the negotiation table is the architecture without a permanent server. In distributed operations—several medium-sized venues across different cities, which is the dominant model in Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, or Mexico—the reduction in on-site infrastructure is multiplied by the number of gaming halls. That calculation almost never appears in the commercial proposal, yet it is usually the biggest cost saving of the entire project.

And the third, less technical and more strategic: player data is the property of the operator, not the provider. Before signing, demand in writing both portability and API access to your own information. The advantage of an integrated ecosystem turns into dependency the day you want to change systems and discover that your behavioral history does not travel with you.

G2E Las Vegas 2026 takes place at The Venetian Expo from September 29 to October 1. DRGT will be at booth 4405.