Gary Francis, head of Business Development at ICONIC21, has more than 15 years of experience across both the operator and supplier sides of iGaming.
For years, operators could customise almost everything about an RNG table, from layout and card design to felt colour and campaign-specific dressed variants.
The one element nobody could ever offer was a table that actually acknowledged the player sitting at it in any meaningful way.
RNG has been a silent game since the day it launched, and the industry largely stopped treating that silence as a problem worth solving.
Francis argues that silence has never been a flaw in RNG, since much of its appeal comes from the player controlling the pace entirely on their own terms.
Two RNG blackjack tables from two different providers deal the same game in the same way, meaning differentiation has historically come down to a new backdrop and fresh card faces.
Francis is careful to draw a clear line between this development and live casino, describing live as a different product built on different mechanics with a different rhythm and reason for existing.
ICONIC21 runs its own live studios and continues to invest in them, with Francis stating the company has no interest in blurring the line between RNG and live casino products.
“An RNG game does not become live casino because someone at the table is talking,” Francis said, adding that what it becomes is an RNG game with a personality.
That thinking sits behind iDealer Blackjack, ICONIC21’s seven-seat RNG blackjack game featuring an AI-powered dealer built to go beyond a simple presentation layer.
Operators retain the full suite of customisation already available across ICONIC21’s RNG tables, including layout, card design, and backdrop options, with configurable dealer looks and voice coming soon.
The backdrop uses a live feed from one of ICONIC21’s own studios, bringing some of the atmosphere associated with live casino into the RNG environment.
Francis highlights that the dealer addresses players by a nickname, comments on how hands are playing out, and refers back to rounds already played.
She also understands players in their own language and replies in English with local inflection, handling a significant portion of what localisation typically demands from operators.
Francis noted that requests to make an RNG lobby feel distinct have always ended in a conversation about re-skinning, making this the first time the answer is genuinely not a cosmetic one.
