Pragma, a technology company specializing in backend infrastructure for online, multiplayer, and live-service games, has been steadily expanding its offerings to support studios worldwide. Six months ago, the company acquired FirstLook.gg, a leading platform for playtesting and player engagement.
Pragma’s CEO, Eden Chen, highlighted the strategic value of the acquisition:
“When I first met Robert van Hoesel and René Klačan, I was blown away by what they’d built — and by their vision for playtesting, community management, and more. FirstLook not only helps studios create better games, but it also connects them with their earliest adopters and most loyal community members, who, importantly, fuel a game’s growth over time.
For us at Pragma, this move marks another big step in our mission to empower game studios and improve their chances of success. We already help studios get to market faster, cheaper, and more reliably with the Pragma engine—now, we can also enable them to engage and expand their player communities like never before.”
Six months after the deal, we followed up with Pragma’s CEO, Eden Chen, to see how this acquisition has shaped the company’s trajectory and its growing role in strengthening the ecosystem for live-service and multiplayer developers.
For readers who may not be familiar, what is FirstLook, and what problem is it solving for game studios today?
At the simplest level, FirstLook is about helping studios build real relationships with their players. We’re best known as a playtesting ecosystem for all sizes of game, from indie titles through to behemoth AAA franchises. We’ve since expanded into being a full marketing operating system with influencer management, social listening, player communication, in-game events and telemetry, rewards and quests, and much more.
What we noticed is that most teams were duct-taping together a dozen different tools to help market their game. Google Forms, Discord bots, SurveyMonkey, spreadsheets, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Hootsuite – you name it. It was a messy, disconnected, and time-consuming process all in all.
FirstLook takes all of that complexity and rolls it into one platform, but at the same time lets studios pick and choose the features that they need. Player onboarding, player insights, player engagement, and player growth all in one place. The point is to get studios out of managing spreadsheets and tools and back to what they actually want to be doing: making games and learning how to make them better from their players.
Why did Pragma decide to acquire FirstLook, and how does it fit into Pragma’s broader mission of powering online games?
Our mission at Pragma is to build the modern publishing stack for games. We already have a flourishing backend engine platform which is used by major studios and publishers such as Omeda, Night Street Games and People Can Fly. However, we saw a critical gap in the market.
Distribution and marketing are the biggest problems in games today, and the tools that help studios are vastly deficient. For instance, while every other industry has a CRM, there has been no Player CRM for the games industry.
That’s where FirstLook comes in. Playtesting is the first moment when studios discover whether players truly care about their game, and FirstLook transforms that moment from something chaotic into something consistent, measurable, and repeatable.
What makes FirstLook such an unmissable opportunity for Pragma is that no other tool in the market does what it does. While our backend services operate behind the scenes, FirstLook is player-facing. It’s the direct touchpoint where developers learn what players think and feel. Pragma and FirstLook can be used separately or together, working seamlessly on their own, although there are also exciting synergies when you bring them together.
How does FirstLook help studios predict whether a game will resonate with players before launch?
For too long, the industry has obsessed over wishlists as the main – if not the only – barometer of pre-launch success. Wishlists however, are a lagging indicator.
The better approach is to look at community health holistically. What is the k-factor or virality of their wishlist numbers (are people inviting their friends?)? Is sentiment trending positive or negative? Are influencers organically covering the game?
“How many wishlists” is a good start, but studios need to understand why potential players are excited or frustrated with your game. That’s the data that actually predicts staying power.
What metrics do you think matter most in 2025 when moving from pre-launch testing to a confident full release?
One-time acquisition doesn’t really matter in 2025. Sustained engagement is the key thing. The metrics that matter measure community health and player retention. We’ve seen so many games that popped off on the first day and then struggled to retain any of their players.
One of FirstLook’s partner studios, Night Street Games, saw about a 40% repeat rate on their playtests. That’s gold. If players are coming back to play an unfinished game, it tells you they see something worth investing in.
We’re doubling down on features that make those signals clearer: social listening, retention charts, playtime analysis, and session data. We’re even experimenting with XP-based reward systems to keep communities engaged. It all boils down to whether players are staying and inviting others too.
How can playtesting data help studios get investment or a publishing deal?
Investors and publishers will always look to de-risk their decisions. While a polished pitch deck and a slick vertical slice are still valuable to give potential investors a feel for your team and your game, hard numbers from real players are on a whole different level.
Studios could walk into investor meetings and say, for example, “We onboarded thousands of players, 40% came back for repeat playtests, and here’s exactly how player feedback shaped our roadmap.” That’s a totally different conversation than “Our team is all ex-big publishers and we think we spotted a gap in the market.”
Data transforms a pitch from speculation into evidence.
Can you share a real-world example of how feedback from FirstLook testers directly changed or improved a game?
Yeah – Last Flag by Night Street Games again. Their community consistently flagged UX pain points and even suggested a passive healing mechanic that became central to how the game is running right now. The studio could see trends across clearly structured data and could differentiate one-off noise from clear patterns.
They made those changes, which massively helped both the gameplay and the overall reception. That’s the value of community feedback: it gives teams the confidence to make huge changes without second-guessing whether they’re just chasing random comments.
How does FirstLook support teams in turning player feedback into meaningful changes?
It’s hard enough to get feedback. Making sense of it is a whole other kettle of fish.
What FirstLook does is shorten the cycle between feedback and actionable insight. We have the only cross-modal surveying tool – we can send surveys in-game, on Discord, or over the web so studios can be wherever their players are. We also have sentiment tools that automatically highlight hot-button issues, so teams don’t have to manually sift through every Discord message or survey response.
We also make it easy to segment. For example, you can filter survey data to only look at players who’ve logged 10+ hours or already wishlisted your game. That way, you’re prioritizing feedback from the most invested part of your community, not just random drop-ins. Then, of course, with our platform, it’s easier to test whether the changes you implement have had the desired effect.
How important are platforms like Discord and Reddit for understanding what players really want?
Absolutely critical. If you’re not paying attention to Discord, Reddit, Steam reviews, and YouTube comments, you’re missing some of the most honest feedback you’ll ever get.
Discord should be treated as one of the critical sources of truth today. We’ve helped studios track sentiment across hundreds of thousands of reactions and comments. Over time, we want to pull in more platforms and connect that data back to player profiles. It’s the unfiltered conversations that reveal what players actually think, not polished survey answers people are forced to respond to.
Looking ahead, how do you see tools like FirstLook reshaping how developers, publishers, and players collaborate in the game development process?
We’re moving away from development happening in a black box, where players only see the final product. The future is more open, collaborative, and continuous.
FirstLook is helping make that possible by turning development into an ongoing dialogue. Studios can test features, gather feedback, and manage their communities all in real time. The result is better games and communities that are stronger because they feel invested in the outcome. When players feel like co-creators instead of just consumers, the relationship between studio and community fundamentally changes.
We also see opportunities for tools like FirstLook to be used on an ongoing basis, not just as playtesting or pre-launch player engagement platforms. Ultimately, live service games are an exercise in continuous development and testing of new features and new content. Seeing player feedback and engagement as pre-launch phenomena is increasingly short-sighted.
CEO of Pragma
