Hacksaw Gaming is a Malta-founded, Sweden-headquartered games supplier that floated on Nasdaq Stockholm in 2025 at a valuation near two billion euros. It is best known for high-volatility slots and scratchcards, with crash and instant-win titles, the Dare2Win range, as a real but secondary line.
For a crash audience, Hacksaw is an unusual case. It carries some of the strongest regulatory credentials in the business, an MGA licence, a UK Gambling Commission licence and a public listing, alongside one of the weakest player-facing transparency models. The same Dare2Win Plinko can be set to return anywhere from 88.20% to 98.98% depending on which operator runs it, and none of its games offer provably fair verification.
That tension, strong oversight from above, thin transparency at the point of play, is the whole story of this profile. This page covers who Hacksaw is, what it ships, and what its configurable RTP means for the money you put through one of its games.
The 30-second version
Hacksaw is a slot-first studio, not a crash specialist. Its Dare2Win Plinko, Speed Crash and Limbo run on certified RNG with no provably fair, and the RTP is operator-configurable across seven tiers. The licensing is genuinely top-tier, MGA plus UKGC plus a Nasdaq listing, but the live RTP is only shown in the in-game info panel, so always check it before you bet.
🏢 Who Hacksaw Gaming is
Hacksaw is a business-to-business supplier: it builds games and licenses them to casinos rather than running a casino of its own. The MGA-licensed operating entity is HGMT Ltd, a Maltese company registered in Zebbug under company number C84111. The listed parent is Hacksaw AB (publ), which trades on Nasdaq Stockholm under the ticker HACK, and a Sweden-based studio entity handles much of the development.
The company launched operationally in 2018 as a scratchcard specialist, then pivoted into video slots around 2019 to 2020, which is where its reputation was made. By the end of 2025 it employed 254 people, up from around 100 at the start of that year, with its head office in Malta and a significant presence in Stockholm.
Leadership reflects the listed-company era. Christoffer Källberg, from a banking and investment background, was appointed Group CEO in January 2025 and is the spokesman on investor matters. Marcus Cordes, who joined in 2018 and built the studio as COO then CEO, continues in a senior gaming role; Patrick Svensk chairs the board and Philippa Gregory is chief compliance officer.
📝 For the record: sources split on the founding year between 2017 and 2018. We use 2018, the operational launch anchored to Hacksaw’s first MGA licence, which is the date the company itself uses.
🔍 From scratchcards to a Nasdaq listing
Hacksaw’s rise was fast and capped by a heavily oversubscribed float. The milestones below trace the route from a small Maltese scratchcard house to a public company.
Operational launch, MGA licence issued
Starts as a scratchcard specialist under HGMT Ltd, with its Malta B2B critical-supply licence dated 6 December 2018.
The pivot to high-volatility slots
Shifts focus from scratchcards to bonus-buy-driven slots, the line that produced Wanted Dead or a Wild and built the studio’s name.
Swedish regulatory sanction
Spelinspektionen fines the Swedish studio entity for supplying two unlicensed operators. Detail and the appeal outcome are below.
Christoffer Källberg appointed Group CEO
A banking-background appointment widely read as a governance signal ahead of the listing.
Nasdaq Stockholm IPO
First trading on 25 June 2025. Hacksaw AB (publ) sold 43.5 million existing shares at SEK 77 each for proceeds of about SEK 3.35 billion, valuing the company near SEK 22 billion, roughly two billion euros, with more than 16,000 new shareholders.
⚙️ The Dare2Win crash and instant-win games
Hacksaw’s crash-relevant titles all sit inside one range, Dare2Win. The catalogue here is small next to its slots, but two of these games are the reason a crash reader lands on a Hacksaw page at all.
The confirmed Dare2Win line covers Speed Crash, Limbo, Dice, Baccarat, Twenty-One, Colors, Blocks, Wheel, Lines, Hi-Lo, Plinko, Mines, Coins and Boxes. Plinko and Mines are the most played. Speed Crash is the dedicated crash title and Limbo is a crash-style multiplier game; there are no table or live-dealer games in the wider Hacksaw catalogue at all.
- Plinko. The most popular Dare2Win title and the one that defines Hacksaw’s RTP story. We cover the multi-studio picture in the Plinko game guide.
- Limbo. A fixed-target multiplier game in crash clothing. The format and its maths are in the Limbo game guide.
The wider business is slot-first. The catalogue stood at 290 live titles at the end of 2025, roughly split between in-house games and third-party studios onboarded through Hacksaw’s OpenRGS platform. Flagship slots include Wanted Dead or a Wild, at 96.38% RTP and a 12,500x ceiling, plus Chaos Crew, Hand of Anubis, Le Bandit and Stick ‘Em, built on proprietary mechanics such as DuelReels and StackWays.
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📊 Configurable RTP: the central concern
The single most important fact about a Hacksaw game is that its RTP is not fixed. Dare2Win Plinko ships with seven operator-selectable settings: 98.98%, 98.28%, 97.27%, 96.02%, 94.30%, 92.03% and 88.20%. The casino chooses one, and the game looks and plays identically whichever it picks.
That is a 10.78 percentage-point swing on a single game. At the top setting the house edge is about 1.02%; at the bottom it is 11.8%, more than eleven times higher, on a game the player cannot tell apart. The active figure is shown only in the in-game info screen, and Hacksaw does not publish which operators run which tier.
🔍 Worth noting
This is not unique to Plinko. Hacksaw slots typically ship around four tiers, for example Hand of Anubis at 96.24%, 94.32%, 92.28% and 88.41%. As a real-world marker, the UK operator Fluffy Spins discloses 94.30% on its Hacksaw Plinko, well below the 98.98% top tier.
Configurable RTP is not a Hacksaw invention, and the table below shows where it sits among the studios a crash reader is likely to weigh against it. The split is consistent: crypto-native crash leaders use fixed, high, published RTP as a selling point, while studios distributing through many regulated operators leave the number to the operator.
The reason this matters more in 2026 than it did a year ago is tax. The UK is raising Remote Gaming Duty from 21% to 40% on slots and table games from 1 April 2026, and analysts have already tracked operators quietly moving popular games to lower RTP tiers to protect margins. A configurable model makes that trivially easy, and the risk for UK players is being pushed onto an 88% to 94% setting without ever seeing the change. The relevance to Hacksaw’s most popular crash product, Plinko, is exactly why this concern leads its profile, and it is the legitimate core of the wider question we take apart in the is Plinko rigged guide.
The same features that fuel crash and instant-win growth, speed, repeat betting and an invisible edge, are what draw the harm scrutiny. We cover the research, the risk factors and what regulators are doing in a dedicated guide: crash gambling and player harm.
“The regulator vouches for Hacksaw. The player still cannot tell whether the Plinko in front of them returns 99% or 88%.”
🛡️ Licensing and fairness
Hacksaw’s licensing stack is the strongest part of the story and a real differentiator. HGMT Ltd holds an MGA business-to-business critical-supply licence numbered MGA/CRP/501/2018, and the UK Gambling Commission account 54059, a combined remote operating licence covering gambling software. A UKGC licence is the trust marker most crash and instant suppliers simply do not have.
Beyond those two it holds Greek, Isle of Man, Swedish, Romanian, Ontario, Danish and several US-state licences, for 35-plus regulated markets in total, with games certified by eCOGRA and QUINEL and an ISO 27001 information-security badge. That is a genuinely deeper compliance footprint than typical crash specialists carry.
🔍 Worth noting
The record is not spotless. In May 2024 Sweden’s regulator issued the Swedish studio entity a formal warning and a SEK 2.6m sanction, about 226,000 euros, for supplying games to two operators without Swedish licences. On appeal the breach was upheld but the fee was cut to SEK 20,000, around 2,000 euros, citing limited Swedish turnover. The licences were unaffected, but it is fair context for any “strongest regulatory profile” claim.
The fairness model is where the trust case thins. Hacksaw games run on certified RNG, audited by labs such as eCOGRA, with no provably fair verification: there is no server seed, client seed and nonce for you to check a round against. Some affiliate pages loosely call Dare2Win “provably fair,” which is wrong; Hacksaw’s own materials describe RNG and certification only.
⚠️ Important
This is the opposite of the model Spribe uses on Aviator, where every round is cryptographically verifiable by the player and the RTP is fixed at 97%. Stake and BC.Game offer the same per-round proof, and BGaming offers it on some titles. With Hacksaw your assurance comes from labs and regulators, not from the player side.
Whether that matters depends on what you trust. For crypto-native players who want to verify results themselves, the absence of provably fair plus a hidden RTP setting is a genuine drawback. If you are happy to rely on MGA and UKGC oversight, the picture is more reassuring, with the caveat that oversight does not tell you which RTP tier your casino has chosen. The generic mechanics of how round verification works are covered in the provably fair explainer, and the fixed-RTP, fully-verifiable counterpoint is the Spribe profile.
📈 Market position
Hacksaw is a slot-first, high-volatility studio that leads in scratchcards and plays a credible but secondary role in crash and instant-win. As of mid-2026 it is live with more than 3,000 operator brands across 35-plus regulated markets, including bet365, LeoVegas, Betsson, Betway, Stake.com, DraftKings and BetMGM, and it onboards outside studios such as Ace Roll, Bullshark Games and Aloha Gaming through OpenRGS.
The business is well diversified and highly profitable. Revenue climbed from 67m euros in 2023 to 137m in 2024 and 197.5m in 2025, up 44% year on year, with adjusted EBIT of 161.4m euros at an 82% margin. No single game makes up more than a small share of the total, the top ten contributed 44% of gross gaming revenue in 2025, down from 60% a year earlier, with no client over 13% and no country over 10% of bets.
The reputation matches the numbers, with an EGR B2B Slot Provider of the Year award in 2024 and heavy streamer visibility. The honest summary for a crash reader is the one this profile opened with: a studio you can trust at the regulatory level, playing games whose live RTP you must check for yourself, every time.