Gamescom this summer marked a natural extension of Pragma’s mission, expanding from backend infrastructure into player engagement and discovery. The LA-based backend infrastructure platform had acquired FirstLook in February, adding discoverability and marketing to its toolbox for studios. CEO Eden Chen and team arrived in Cologne with FirstLook’s first consumer-facing booth, a shared pavilion where seven studios could enjoy the spotlight.

The experiment underlines Chen’s thesis about where the games business is stuck: not in making games, but in getting them seen. In a mature market dominated by live-service giants and shrinking player attention, discovery and re-engagement have become the real challenges. Pragma’s current focus is on the out-of-game world (the Discords, influencers, sentiment analysis, playtests) and creating tools for studios to put their games in front of the right people.

“This year we launched our own player network,” explains Chen, when we sit down to chat about his vision. “This is our ability to provide playtesters to studios and eventually act as a matchmaker between studios and players. We're a tools company, so our success is in studios being successful at the end of the day.” 

He contrasts what FirstLook does with something like Steam or the console stores – applications they’re not trying to compete directly with. “They're primarily a consumer business. Their business is all in benefiting the player, giving them the best experience. Sometimes those are fully aligned, and the player and the studio both benefit. And sometimes less so,” he says. “Our job is to be the studio advocate. With our player network, we’re thinking about how to use it to be a better matchmaker for our studios.”

Taking to the show floor

And this leads us to the Gamescom pavilion, and FirstLook’s decision to face the public on the expo show floor for the first time. Every Gamescom the team had been to before had a b2b focus, but this time, FirstLook was on the show floor.

“We heard from a lot of our studios, ‘It's too expensive for us to get our own booth over there!’” says Chen, explaining why they started looking at the consumer halls of the show. “We work with over 100 studios, and we heard this request from a lot of them. They want to present at Gamescom but it’s a lot.”

So they took out a booth themselves and provided it as a service to their studios. The seven games they showcased were a diverse bunch, not unified by anything other than their creativity and their desire to show new IP to gamers. The titles getting their first Gamescom airing were:

• Gods, Death & Reapers from Wolcen Studio (“hardcore, looks like a ‘Diablo’ kind of game!”)
• The Holdouts from Ruckus
• Cloudheim from Noodle Cat Games
• Last Flag from Night Street Games
• Starlight Revolver from Pahdo Labs
• The Signal from Goosebyte
• Dead as Disco from Brain Jar Games (“a great music game”) 

“It doesn't matter if you have a $100 million budget for your game, or if you’re two people working on a game in your garage in your spare time,” observes Chen. “There's a lot of noise out there, and everyone's trying to figure out how to get in front of players.”

FirstLook’s booth was a place where people could playtest the games right there. It worked, and the level of ambition has been raised for 2026. “If you looked at the centre of our booth,” says Chen, “you’d see we had a four-person back-to-back area where people could come and play co-op or competitive games. Usually, a booth is just one screen, one game at a time. Our ‘playtest together’ experience was something that resonated really well, and we're going to try doing that same experience again next year. We're going to do three times the size, actually! I think we might be one of the biggest booths next year, with 20 studios.”

Sharing the spotlight

Pragma and FirstLook work with over 100 studios from small (five to 10 people) to big (including Bungie, Sony, EA and more), giving the firm wide experience across the market. Eden Chen draws our attention to a core industry problem: a highly saturated and consolidated market. Dominant platforms and massive evergreen games like Fortnite and Roblox capture most of the players and spending.

“There are shifts over time that have caused the industry to really struggle,” he says. “We're in a more mature industry. The move to live services means there are big franchises that eat up a lot of the industry. Roblox is, in many ways, bigger than Steam. If you look at the total number of open player supply that's available, it's less and less. And on top of that there’s competition from Tiktok and all the media opportunities like streaming services – people are just flooded with choice. This is 10 years of shifting and that is the world we we live in. If you're an independent studio, it is really hard to break out.”

He points out that funding new content and new IP is more difficult than it's ever been. “No big publisher is really doing new content, or very few,” he says. “There are new independent and micro publishers coming out and doing smaller deals. But the big publishers? They are not doing new deals any more – you don't really see Activision or 2K signing lots of new IP. It's just too risky.”

But is there hope? He sees a future where very small teams, perhaps working on a game as a side project to their day job, can still make great games – the challenge is getting them published, and noticed. “It’s great to see that there have been really strong indie hits over the last 12 to 18 months,” Chen confirms. “Things like REPO and Schedule 1 from really small teams coming out of nowhere, and able to do really well. The reality is there are more people playing games than there ever have been in the history of the world, and more money being spent on games than ever. So if you make a good game and somehow get it in front of people, the opportunity’s as big as it's ever been.”

Breaking through in a saturated market

This is where Chen says Pragma and FirstLook come in, helping studios navigate that landscape. Pragma started as “an infrastructure production tool” – it’s expensive to build an online game, so Pragma’s back-end tools help games get to market – but with FirstLook the recent shift is to solving the discovery problem: player onboarding, playtesting, influencer management, sentiment tracking, re-engagement tools.

“The reason why we ended up acquiring FirstLook and starting that whole side of things was because we just had such high failure rates in the studios we were working with,” he admits. “Our job is making tools to help studios be successful. And if we're only on the production side of things, that's one half of the problem. If nobody plays the game that’s the rest of the problem, and we weren’t contributing to that at all. That was a big desire for us: how do we help studios with all the barriers?”

Chen’s team is aware that developers are not inherently experts at social media content or influencer management strategy, or community management, and their tools are designed to manage the ecosystem from one “full marketing stack”. 

“What's the Reddit strategy? What's the Discord strategy? What's the TikTok strategy? There's way too much stuff out there to figure out on your own! Those are foreign things to you,” he says. “You're good at producing a game, but now your job has shifted to marketing. That's almost the hardest possible thing! We can help them onboard 1000s of creators and get them [Steam] keys. We can onboard their fans. We can help them understand what their fans are thinking, and show them how to catch the Steam algorithm, deal with re-engagement, measure what players are doing and communicate with them.” 

He has a few examples: “One thing we're doing is integrating a fulfilment provider; you can drop-ship physical items to gamers who refer you, or who reach a certain level. There are a lot of fun things you can do programmatically that in reality, a lone studio is unlikely to do such a specific thing, but we can do it, because our business is creating these fun tools.”

 

Our conversation turns to generative AI (especially Large Language Models), a hot topic in marketing, not only because it can create content but because it’s very good at sentiment analysis, which can help with player feedback. Is this something Pragma and FirstLook are using?

“We have a combination of LLMs and machine learning,” Eden Chen explains. “That’s always how sentiment has always been categorised, via machine learning. There are things that LLMs can do very well, like language and context. An LLM or ‘AI’ is just another form of technology at the end of the day. When AI is used for content creation, it tends to be controversial. But in the case of analysis, you're using it as a tool to benchmark something. It’s well used if you have a big data set, and you're trying to have gamer language understood.” 

From infrastructure to discovery

“We want to create every single marketing asset for a studio,” confides Chen when we ask what’s next on FirstLook’s roadmap. Already, the service can create all of a studio’s marketing email templates, including graphics, and has a pipeline for onboarding creators. Now they’re eyeing up community hubs. “It’s a homepage almost, that does your social integrations: Twitch, YouTube, and your in-game stats. Eventually, we want to also create all the ad assets. Eventually, a studio could come and spend 30 minutes uploading some assets, and then they could have every single marketing asset that they need – a website, merch store, web store… That's where we're going.”

This is an evolution of what FirstLook provided when Pragma acquired it. Chen explains, “Historically, FirstLook has been spending a lot of time on out-of-game systems. Discord, Reddit and things going on in these other places. Meanwhile, our back-end has been working on in-game happenings: authentication, your login, your friends, your purchases. I can see a world where we start tying these two services together, and holistically looking at a player from the in-game and out-of-game [perspectives].”

This would create re-engagement opportunities, which Chen likens to manual processes from the old MMO days. “In the days of ICQ, if our guild was getting attacked, we would sound the Bat Phone to our friends and summon them to help! We could automate all these in-game functions: your guild’s getting attacked so everyone gets messaged on Discord. ‘Your clan just got passed on the leaderboards by another clan. Hop back in!’ If it’s Helldivers: ‘95% of the bugs have been defeated, hop in so you can watch the liberation live.’ 

“If a player is about to churn because they haven't logged on for the last three months, you can send them a personalised offer. Or a player can be congratulated for a milestone and send an email and a free t-shirt. These are really interesting things that I don't think anyone's really tackling yet, and they could drive fan engagement and retention and re-engagement.”

Chen’s background as a competitive gamer informs his outlook. Before running Pragma, he was a semi-pro competitive gamer. “For me personally, a lot of my friends have made playing games. I play with the same high school friends I played with competitively! Every single week, we have our game night. I'm passionate about the games industry. It's a scary world for independent creators when platforms are too dominant. I'd like to see more games created! Our mission is to be that intermediary where we provide tools for independent games to be successful.”