Managing a plurality of electronic gaming machines includes receiving a designation at a first electronic gaming machine (EGM) that the first EGM is a service gateway, broadcasting to other EGMs of the plurality of EGMs that the first EGM is the service gateway, and performing at least one of: discovering the other EGMs, identifying the other EGMs as client EGMs, and obtaining data from all of the client EGMs and retrieving crash data from all of the client EGMs, and communicating with a server to request performance of the at least one of the operations on selected ones of the plurality of EGMs.