Hit Bar Gold

What is Hit Bar Gold?

From recruitment to regulation, cybersecurity, tribal gaming, affiliates, gambling law, C-suite leaders and everything else in between, the campaign has shown that where roles, companies and backgrounds differ, many of the women we have honoured share a united drive to improve diversity within the sector.

This year sees the return of the majority of our judging panel for either the first, second or third consecutive year! Their confidence in the campaign, and how it’s run is a real testament to Most Influential Women, and how highly it is regarded across the sector, particularly as these types of lists and rankings gain popularity across industry media.

As of today, submissions for the 2026 iGB’s Most Influential Women list are open! We are once again looking for nominations that highlight all facets of the sector, and the women who are championing change and acting as leading forces within their company, or the sector more broadly.

How to play Hit Bar Gold

“That dual value is really the point of the deal,” he explains. “Owning a leading local operator gives us direct, ground-level insight into regulatory developments, player behaviour and payment infrastructure across several African markets, insight that is very difficult to build from the outside.

“Over time we expect that knowledge and local presence to help us open conversations with other operators looking to enter or expand in Africa, in the same way our historical B2C experience in Europe underpinned our platform proposition there.

“So this is not an either/or. It is a B2C acquisition that we expect to strengthen our B2B pipeline on the continent.”

What is Hit Bar Gold?

“I don’t think the successful studio of the future necessarily has hundreds of people,” he says. “It could be a relatively small group of extremely talented people with great ideas, strong brands and a very good understanding of players, supported by technology that does much of the heavy lifting.”

That would also shift the basis on which studios compete. If sophisticated development capabilities become accessible to a wider range of creators, scale alone becomes less of an advantage.

“It becomes less about how many developers you employ and much more about how creative you are and how well you understand the player,” Curwen says.