Orlando, FL. January 21-25, 2025 – D3 Sports Tech founder and CEO Tom Naramore journeys to the PGA Show once again to build partnerships.
Now that was a great PGA Show!
Wow. This was D3 Sports Tech Team’s 6th year participating in the PGA Show and it was one of the best in many ways. The industry reports that more than 33,000 golf industry professionals from 94 countries and all 50 U.S. states came together to meet with more than 1,100 participating brands at the 72nd PGA Show in Orlando, Florida, Jan. 21-24, 2025. Much of the excitement is driven by the sustained trend in golf participation, with impressive growth among the 18 – 24-year-olds that love both the ‘mental break’ of getting outside to play, and the integration of new technologies both on and off-course.
If you’ve been following D3 since 2019, you’ll recall that we started out as a golf app, the first mobile app in the world to legally escrow, settle and payout winnings of golf side-wagers between green grass golfers. Our superpower, it turned out, was not the actual app as much as the proprietary technology, the “Digital Wallet for Wagering”. And after walking the PGA Show and meeting with our current partners and new ones, it looks like the golf industry has finally hit that tipping point of acceptance around gamification and playing for something.
Let’s call it Gamification
Golf has long embraced wagering as part of the game and part of the culture. Everyone knows it, (almost) everyone plays for something, whether it’s a drink after the round, or winning your buddies cold hard cash. The PGA still doesn’t really know how to legally navigate it, while the industry is pushing forward on new ways to use technology to normalize the side games we love to play. Gamification is a term that was coined in the early 2000s and has only picked up traction in the golf industry to help identify ways to add more game elements to increase involvement, or engagement. For golf, it’s not just your 18-hole round (the game), it’s the extra elements, those little challenges like “Polies”, “Sixes” and the occasional “Sneak”, that encourage that extra interaction and often lead to a friendly wager on your own activity. Afterall, “Gambling is illegal at Bushwood sir… and I never slice.”
Simulator Technology is Leading the Way
As has been the case for a few years, golf simulator technology is driving industry growth, and now more than ever with gamification. Just look at the new TGL. We now have a Monday night (or Tuesday) morsel to see that the Pros are having fun using this beefed-up simulator world, mixing alternate shot play with stroke play, winning points on every hole, with the added use of a ‘hammer’ challenge that can double the point total on any hole when used. We’re excited to see these little twists in the game on every hole to make it more fun and engaging to watch.
At the PGA Show, there were more new Simulator companies on the floor than ever before. All the big guys were there, including Full Swing, Trackman, Golfzon, aboutGolf, Rapsodo, TruGolf, and Uneekor. Every year, these giants upgrade their software to make things more realistic looking and make improvements to their hardware for better platform performance. One collaboration got a lot of buzz and rightfully so. Our current Partner, TruGolf teamed up with Platform Golf and Science in Motion putting to show off their new technology that adjusts the slope in the fairway and on the putting green. After all, we can’t keep improving our games if we always hit from a perfect flat surface, can we? But for making our simulator time more fun, we give a nod to both our current partners aboutGolf and TruGolf who continually make gamification a priority to make our time both more fun and exciting too.
The Outlook for 2025
The golf industry will be taking the momentum of the last few years into 2025 and focusing on how technology integrations can enhance player experiences. If our time in Las Vegas at CES2025 and at the PGA Merchandise Show tells us anything, it’s that D3 Sports Tech can help power the games that everyone says they want to add in 2025.
Watch for more reflection on the PGA Show in the weeks ahead as we strive to share our expertise with the golf industry about what’s possible and what’s legal when people play for something.
Schedule a Demo with the D3ST team to learn more about why brands with Games need a wagering wallet.