The Playbook 2026: Digital Gaming Roundtable

The NFL season remains the single biggest proving ground in sports betting — the moment when new products, new platforms, and new bets on where the industry is headed all get tested at once. This year’s opener, a Super Bowl LX rematch between the defending champion Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots, kicks off a season where the stakes for operators are just as high as they are on the field. The competitive landscape is shifting on multiple fronts at once, forcing companies across the ecosystem to rethink long-held assumptions about how they compete and where their edge actually comes from.

Join us for the third annual edition of The Playbook, sponsored by EDGE Markets, where we hear from 36 leaders across DFS/Fantasy, OSB/iGaming, Lottery, Media, Betting Tools & Analytics, RegTech/Payments, B2B, and Prediction Markets/Exchange. In this comprehensive discussion, these industry players break down the forces shaping digital gaming heading into the 2026 season and beyond, sharing how they’re adapting to a rapidly shifting landscape and positioning themselves to come out ahead.

The Format Wars 🔀

Prediction markets aren’t a side conversation this year — they’re forcing every operator across every vertical to decide whether they’re building towards predictions, watching the landscape, or getting out of the way.

  1. Seth Young (High Roller) on the prediction market opportunity: “This is one of the most exciting opportunities we’ve seen in years – the kind you look at and know you can’t sit out…When the TAM estimates are running toward $50 billion, built on projections of $1.5 trillion in annual contract trading volume by 2030, it is a category worth focusing on.”
  2. Toby Bucsescu (Blitz:Draft) on the DFS gap left as competitors expand into prediction markets: “DFS is now being managed, not innovated. Format experiments don’t happen and the casual user gets left behind. For us, that’s not just a window, it’s a durable gap. Reorienting toward DFS innovation would be enormously costly for them at this point, and I don’t think they want to. That is where Blitz:Draft comes in.”

Regulatory Whiplash ⚖️

Nearly every operator we spoke with described the current environment as the most unpredictable of their careers — and the smart money is building for optionality, not a specific outcome.

  1. Joey Levy (Betr) on the state of the industry: “We are in the most uncertain and dynamic regulatory environment in industry history, and anyone who projects with confidence exactly how all of this will play out over the next few years is at least a little bit misguided.”
  2. Matt Peterson (Tallysight) on product flexibility: “The experience should work the same regardless of which legal box a product sits in…By staying product-led and close to our customers, we built a platform that adapts to whatever regulatory environment it operates in. Because of those decisions, prediction markets did not require a rebuild, only an extension.”

Beyond the Novelty 🎯

Last year’s AI conversation was about speed and scale. This year it’s about specificity and building with intent — AI-native platforms answering a fan’s exact question, powered by proprietary models trained and calibrated over years, not bolted on overnight.

  1. Adam Fiske (Cipher Sports Technology Group) on compounding advantages: “Of course, large amounts of capital can buy talent and access to reliable data. What can’t be replicated is our historical and ongoing investment, developing models that made real calls, that were graded by real outcomes, and were rebuilt around what worked and what didn’t. That accumulated learning, and the ecosystem that keeps compounding it, is the part that can’t be shortcut.”
  2. Aishik Lala (Rotobot AI) on AI-powered personalization: “Accurate and relevant information alone isn’t going to cut it when we think about what people will want long term. People get attached to a product when it feels like it was built for their needs.”

From Transaction to Relationship 🤝

The platforms pulling ahead on retention aren’t the ones with the best edge — they’re the ones that turned a solitary habit into a social one.

  1. Nan Wang (Sleeper) on the advantages of social betting: “That’s also the part I don’t think can be acquired. You either have the room where people are already arguing, or you’re buying distribution into one. It’s an advantage and north star we’ll keep leaning into as we build the social layer around predictions.”
  2. Frank Michael Smith (GeoSports) on engagement trends: “Our players love the game so much that they remind each other to play every day after sharing scores in text message group chats. If you build a great experience and make it easy to share, your customers will advertise for you.”

Read the full Playbook here: What’s NXST