Building windmills to harness winds of change
Strategy meets execution from every side of the gaming table
deWaal Consulting is a strategic gaming consultancy bringing 30+ years of operator, manufacturer, and platform experience to partners navigating traditional gaming, emerging digital verticals, and the gamification of customer engagement beyond the casino floor.
30+
Years in gaming
5
Continents Served
Multiple
Issued Patents
30+
Studio Team
What we are
A rare combination of institutional knowledge and entrepreneurial execution
deWaal Consulting is a full-service strategic gaming consultancy founded and led by Daniel deWaal, a career-long gaming executive whose experience spans casino operations, major gaming equipment manufacturers, platform startups, and product innovation. That breadth of perspective — having sat on every side of the table — is what distinguishes our approach.
We help established operators launch digital products, gaming manufacturers enter new markets, and technology companies from outside the industry identify and develop commercial opportunities within regulated gaming. Increasingly, we help organizations across all sectors apply gaming’s proven engagement science — loyalty mechanics, reward architecture, real-time personalization — to gamify their customer experience. Our engagements range from comprehensive business planning and financial modeling to hands-on execution support, talent recruitment, and product development.
Daniel is also the founder and principal behind Kingsize Games, Inc. — a boutique third-party game studio with deep creative resources and advertising industry experience. This means deWaal Consulting offers what few consultancies can — the ability to move from strategy through to production delivery under one roof.
Operator Experience
Built and operated casinos across four US states and South Africa, from construction through multi-year operations.
OEM Leadership
Senior product strategy roles at two of the world’s largest gaming equipment manufacturers. Pioneered the service window and drove its industry-wide adoption — a slot machine innovation that created a multi-billion dollar sub-industry.
Platform Innovation
Co-founded and delivered one of the industry’s first BMM-certified mobile Class II/III gaming platforms.
Successful Exit
Founded a gaming technology company subsequently acquired by a major global OEM.
Studio Capability
In-house bespoke game studio with 30+ professionals spanning game/graphic design, sound, mathematics, and development.
What we do
Consulting services across traditional gaming verticals as well as specialist services related to customer engagement and development using gamification and gaming methodologies for non-gaming companies
Our practice spans the full lifecycle of gaming ventures — from initial market analysis and strategic planning through product development, regulatory certification, launch execution, and ongoing optimization. We work across Class II, Class III, iGaming, sports betting, and non-traditional gaming markets.
01
Strategic Advisory & Business Planning
Comprehensive business planning, financial modeling, market analysis, and go-to-market strategy for gaming ventures. We develop detailed implementation roadmaps with actionable milestones, competitive positioning analysis, and investor-ready materials that reflect real operational understanding — not theoretical frameworks.
Tags: Market entry strategy · Financial projections · Competitive analysis · Organizational design · Investor presentations
02
Digital Transformation & iGaming
End-to-end support for operators launching or expanding online gaming operations. From platform evaluation and product strategy through organizational build-out, talent recruitment, VIP program migration, and omnichannel integration. We specialize in helping land-based operators extend their customer relationships into digital channels without cannibalizing existing revenue.
Tags: Platform selection · Product roadmaps · Omnichannel strategy · Launch execution · Key staff recruitment
03
Product Innovation & Game Development
Original game design, mathematics, and content production through our in-house Kingsize Games studio. We create bespoke slot, table, ETG, card, and lottery products for land-based and online markets. Our portfolio includes patented platforms and game families developed specifically to appeal to emerging player demographics, including sports betting crossover audiences.
Tags: Slots · Table games · ETGs · Card games · Game math · Patented mechanics · Cross-platform content
04
Regulatory & Compliance Navigation
Multi-jurisdictional compliance expertise across North American gaming markets, including commercial, tribal, state-route, and emerging frameworks. We provide compliance design services for game development teams, certification guidance for GLI and BMM, and help clients navigate the unique regulatory requirements of each target market — from Class II bingo-based systems to real-money iGaming.
Tags: Jurisdiction analysis · Compliance design · Certification support · Licensing guidance · Regulatory strategy
05
Commercial Development & Partnerships
Leveraging three decades of relationships across operators, manufacturers, regulators, testing laboratories, and investment groups, we broker alliances, facilitate vendor introductions, support contract negotiations, and connect ventures with potential capital partners. Our network spans the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia-Pacific.
Tags: Alliance brokering · Vendor introductions · Contract support · Investor access · Market networking
06
Non-Traditional Gaming, Gamification & Adjacent Verticals
A growing area of our practice: helping organizations outside the traditional gaming industry apply gaming’s proven engagement science to their customer experience — from loyalty mechanics and reward architecture to gamified interfaces and real-time personalization. Equally, we help technology companies in data analytics, retail distribution, fintech, and related fields identify commercial opportunities within regulated gaming. If it touches engagement — or should — we can help.
Tags: Gamified customer engagement · Data-driven gaming solutions · Retail gaming distribution · Technology partnerships · Cross-industry application
Core Capability
Gamification of Customer Engagement
The gaming industry has spent decades and billions of dollars perfecting the science of engagement — reward loops, variable reinforcement schedules, progression mechanics, tiered loyalty structures, real-time personalization, and the psychology of anticipation. These aren’t theoretical constructs. They’re operational systems that have been tested, measured, and optimized across millions of player interactions every single day.
Now every industry — retail, financial services, hospitality, sports, media, healthcare, and beyond — is trying to reverse-engineer what gaming perfected long ago. They’re hiring “gamification consultants” who’ve read about engagement mechanics in a textbook. deWaal Consulting has spent 30+ years building, deploying, and optimizing the real thing.
Daniel deWaal started with what was arguably one of the world’s first multi-property loyalty programs — Sun International’s MVP program. He led the systems product strategy at IGT — shaping the casino management, player tracking, and bonusing platforms that power player engagement across hundreds of casinos worldwide. He invented the service window — the on-machine interface that delivers personalized content to players in real time — creating a multi-billion dollar sub-industry in the process. And through Kingsize Games, he has an in-house creative studio with deep roots in both gaming and advertising that can design, build, and ship engagement products.
This combination of loyalty system architecture, real-time engagement technology, behavioral science rooted in decades of operational data, and a full creative production capability is what makes deWaal Consulting uniquely qualified to help organizations gamify their customer engagement — whether they’re inside the gaming industry or approaching it from the outside.
Engagement Architecture
Design of reward loops, progression systems, achievement frameworks, and variable reinforcement mechanics — drawn directly from decades of real-money gaming experience where engagement directly equals revenue.
Loyalty System Design
Multi-tier program architecture, earn/burn economics, VIP segmentation, and cross-channel reward structures. We’ve built these systems at enterprise scale for operators managing billions in annual gaming revenue.
Real-Time Personalization
Point-of-interaction content delivery, behavioral triggering, dynamic offers, and adaptive messaging. The service window concept that Daniel pioneered at IGT — delivering the right message at the right moment — is the foundation of modern engagement strategy.
Creative Production
Through Kingsize Games, we design and build the actual engagement products — not slide decks about engagement. Game mechanics, visual design, interactive experiences, and gamified interfaces produced by a team with both gaming and advertising industry DNA.
Player Psychology & Data
Behavioral analytics, churn prediction, reactivation strategy, and lifetime value modeling — grounded in real operational data from industries where customer engagement has been measured and monetized more rigorously than anywhere else.
Cross-Industry Application
Helping organizations in retail, fintech, hospitality, media, sports, and other verticals translate gaming’s engagement science into their customer experience — with the credibility and operational depth that only comes from having built the original systems.
Why gaming expertise matters
Every gamification consultant can explain a badge system. Very few have designed loyalty programs that manage millions of player relationships, built the enterprise platforms that power them, invented the real-time delivery mechanisms that personalize them, and led the product strategy at the companies that deploy them globally. That’s the difference between reading about engagement and having engineered it at scale for three decades.
30+
Years in Engagement Systems
Billions
Revenue from Service Window Ecosystem
Multiple
Patents in Gaming Technology
30+
In-House Creative & Dev Team
Deep Domain Expertise
Loyalty, CRM & Player Value Management
deWaal Consulting brings a uniquely grounded perspective to loyalty program design and player relationship management. Daniel deWaal played an early role in developing one of Africa’s first multi-property Most Valued Player (MVP) programs at Sun International — one of the continent’s largest casino resort groups — building foundational expertise in player segmentation, tiered rewards, and cross-property player tracking from the ground up.
As the lead systems product strategist at IGT, Daniel directed the strategic roadmap for casino management, player tracking, and bonusing platforms deployed across hundreds of properties worldwide. It was during this period that he conceived the service window — a secondary display integrated into the slot machine that delivers targeted loyalty content, bonusing, responsible gaming messaging, and player communications directly at the point of play. That single innovation fundamentally changed the relationship between the casino floor and the systems that manage it, creating an entirely new sub-industry within gaming systems that has since generated billions of dollars in cumulative revenue as every major OEM built out their own secondary-display ecosystems.
At Aristocrat, Daniel led both the gaming systems business and the B2B iGaming division, giving him end-to-end visibility into how loyalty systems, player data, and digital engagement platforms intersect across land-based and online channels. This is not theoretical knowledge — it’s the perspective of someone who has designed loyalty programs, built the systems that power them, invented the on-machine interface that delivers them, and managed the product strategy on both sides of the operator-vendor relationship.
Whether you’re building a loyalty program from scratch, migrating a land-based VIP base to digital, evaluating CRM and player management platforms, or exploring how loyalty system design principles can apply to adjacent industries — we bring institutional depth and hands-on experience that very few consultancies can match.
Program Design
Multi-tier loyalty architecture, VIP segmentation, reward economics, and earn/burn modeling.
System Strategy
Platform evaluation, selection, and implementation for CMS, player tracking, and bonusing systems.
Point-of-Play Engagement
Service window strategy, on-machine bonusing, real-time player messaging, and secondary-display ecosystem design.
Omnichannel CRM
Bridging land-based player programs with online engagement, cross-channel journey design.
Player Analytics
Data-driven player valuation, churn prediction, reactivation strategy, and lifetime value optimization.
Beyond Gaming
Applying loyalty system design principles to non-traditional gaming verticals and adjacent industries.
Strategy + Production
Kingsize Games — our in-house creative studio
Daniel deWaal is also the founder and principal behind Kingsize Games, Inc. — a boutique third-party game studio headquartered in Reno, Nevada. With a team of 30+ professionals spanning game design, mathematics, animation, art direction, sound design, and full-stack development, Kingsize provides the production capability that turns consulting strategy into shipping products.
What makes the studio distinctive is its blend of gaming industry veterans and creative talent drawn from the advertising and entertainment industries. This cross-pollination produces game content that is both commercially sound and visually arresting — products that stand out on a casino floor or in an app store. The team currently develops bespoke content for multiple Tier 1 casino equipment suppliers across Class II, Class III, and online markets.
The Kingsize portfolio includes patented game platforms such as Turbo Tables™ (a chipless/hybrid table game system), Black Jackpot™ (a pari-mutuel card game platform with Class II compliance), and the piQum™ family of card games — designed specifically to attract the emerging sports-betting crossover demographic. The studio develops across slots, table games, ETGs, bingo, lottery, and novel game categories.
For deWaal Consulting’s clients, this means access to a fully equipped creative and development resource that can execute on product concepts from initial mathematics through final certification — without the overhead of building an internal team.
Game Design
Original mechanics, feature design, player experience, and demographic targeting.
Mathematics
Par sheets, probability modeling, simulation, and compliance-ready documentation.
Art & Animation
Industry-leading game art, motion graphics, and visual design from a team with advertising industry roots.
Development
Full-stack build across HTML5, native platforms, and proprietary cabinet frameworks.
Sound Design
Original scoring, effects, and adaptive audio for immersive gameplay.
QA & Certification
Compliance testing, GLI/BMM preparation, and multi-jurisdiction certification support.
Patented Platforms
Turbo Tables™, Black Jackpot™, piQum™ — proprietary game systems ready for licensing.
Content Breadth
Slots, tables, ETGs, card games, bingo, lottery, and novel game categories.
About the Founder
Daniel deWaal
Daniel deWaal’s career in gaming spans more than three decades and virtually every corner of the industry — from the operator floor to the OEM boardroom, from startup garage to publicly traded company.
Daniel began his career at Sun International in South Africa, where he led the technology team at the Carousel Entertainment World — at the time the largest casino in the southern hemisphere — from construction through multi-year operations. During this period, he played an early role in developing Sun International’s pioneering multi-property Most Valued Player (MVP) loyalty program, one of the first of its kind in the world.
Moving to the United States, Daniel served as Group Director of IT for Seven Circle Resorts, a gaming management startup where he helped design, build, and operate casinos across Colorado, North Dakota, Texas (Class II), and Nevada — gaining firsthand experience across commercial, tribal, and restricted gaming environments.
Daniel then founded Friendly Matrix, a gaming technology and consulting company that pioneered LAMP/cloud-based SaaS customer loyalty and bonusing through its Rampant Rewards product. The company also developed and deployed — through Mikohn, Acres, and Aristocrat — some of the industry’s first mobile player and slot performance dashboards. Friendly Matrix was acquired by IGT in 2004.
At IGT, Daniel established and led the Dark Horse Studio — a hybrid innovation group that built next-generation products spanning both games and systems. He served as the lead systems product strategist, directing the strategic roadmap for IGT’s casino management, player tracking, and bonusing platforms. It was during this period that Daniel conceived and pioneered the “service window” — a secondary display integrated into the slot machine that could deliver targeted marketing, bonusing, player messaging, and loyalty content directly at the point of play. The service window fundamentally changed the relationship between the casino floor and the systems that manage it, creating an entirely new sub-industry within gaming systems that has since generated billions of dollars in cumulative revenue across the major gaming OEMs that adopted and extended the concept. Daniel also drove the design of the Reel Edge “Joystick” platform and pioneered early skill-based game features. Multiple patents were issued during this tenure.
As VP Product Strategy at Aristocrat Technologies, Daniel was responsible for both the gaming systems business and the B2B iGaming division — managing the product strategy teams that guided Aristocrat’s system platform and online product offerings for regulated markets worldwide. This role gave Daniel a front-row seat as the service window concept he had pioneered at IGT matured into an industry-wide standard, with Aristocrat and every major competitor building increasingly sophisticated secondary-display ecosystems that today underpin bonusing, responsible gaming, cashless, and player engagement strategies across hundreds of thousands of machines globally.
Daniel went on to co-found Nektan America and Respin Gaming/Rapid Games, where his team delivered the first BMM-certified mobile Class II/III on-premise and on-reservation gaming platform — supporting BYOD, tablet, and cashless configurations alongside a full-service race and sports book.
Today, Daniel leads both deWaal Consulting and Kingsize Games, Inc. from Reno, Nevada. The consultancy operates through a dynamic network of contracted and crowd-sourced industry veterans that scales and modifies its skillset based on project need. deWaal Consulting is a Nevada corporation with virtual presence across multiple cities including Las Vegas, and an active client portfolio spanning the Americas, Latin America, and internationally.
2018 – Present
CEO — deWaal Consulting
Full-service strategic gaming consultancy.
2011 – Present
Founder/CEO — Kingsize Games
Bespoke 3rd-party game studio.
2014 – 2019
Co-Founder/CEO — Nektan America & Respin Gaming
White-label mobile casino & first BMM-certified mobile Class II/III platform.
2012 – 2014
VP Product Strategy — Aristocrat
Systems & B2B iGaming divisions.
2004 – 2010
Studio Director & Lead Systems Product Strategist — IGT
Dark Horse Studio, pioneered the service window (now a multi-billion dollar sub-industry), Reel Edge platform.
1999 – 2004
Founder/CEO — Friendly Matrix
Gaming technology company, acquired by IGT.
1995 – 1999
Group Director IT — Seven Circle Resorts
Casino design & operations across four US states.
1991 – 1995
MIS Manager — Sun International
Carousel Entertainment World & MVP loyalty program.
Current & Recent Engagements
A diverse and active portfolio
We work across traditional and non-traditional gaming verticals with a portfolio that reflects the breadth of our capabilities. While we respect client confidentiality, the following descriptions illustrate the range of our current engagements.
Digital Transformation
Supporting a leading Latin American gaming operator’s omnichannel digital transformation.
Market Entry Strategy
Advising an international gaming equipment manufacturer on North American market strategy, commercial partnership development, and product localization for US-regulated markets.
Bespoke Game Content
Developing original slot, table, and card game content through Kingsize Games for multiple Tier 1 casino equipment suppliers across Class II, Class III, and online markets — spanning concepting, mathematics, art, development, and certification support.
Non-Traditional Verticals
Partnering with technology companies to bridge data analytics and retail distribution capabilities into regulated gaming markets — identifying commercial opportunities at the intersection of gaming and adjacent industries.
Compliance & Jurisdictions
Consolidated game compliance requirements across 10+ North American gaming jurisdictions — creating comprehensive reference frameworks for outsource development teams covering commercial, tribal, state-route, and emerging market regulations.
Product Innovation
Designing novel game mechanics targeting the emerging sports-betting crossover demographic — patented card game platforms that blend traditional casino entertainment with the engagement patterns of a younger, digitally-native player base.
Get in Touch
Let’s explore what’s possible
Whether you’re launching an online gaming platform, entering a new market, developing a product, or exploring how your technology capabilities might play in regulated gaming — we’d welcome the conversation.
Reach
Americas · Latin America · International