Pragma Q1 2025 Update
It’s been a jam packed quarter filled with major partnerships, product developments, and a honed focus to empower studios to succeed. With Q1 wrapped up, we share highlights, milestones, and a small look ahead at what’s coming next for Pragma. We’re just getting started—thank you to our team, community, partners, and customers for being part of the journey. Onward to an even bigger Q2!
🚀 Company Updates
Q1 was a milestone quarter for Pragma, marked by major partnerships, growing studio adoption, and a new strategic investment to fuel our next phase of growth. Here are some key company highlights from the last few months.
↗️ Continued Engine Momentum with Prominent Game Studio Partners: We’re proud to welcome Ruckus, PlaySide Studios, and Square Enix. Each is building ambitious experiences, and they've chosen Pragma to power their backend infrastructure with our Engine and/or playtest & community management with FirstLook. To date, over 80 studios have chosen a Pragma tool or service to help supercharge a major part of their game development and successful launch.
💰 Investment Round including Square Enix, Greylock, Upfront and Insight: Pragma raised a $12.75M strategic investment round to accelerate our mission of empowering game developers. This funding will fuel continued development of the Engine and the growth of FirstLook.gg, our playtesting and community management platform now supporting 40+ studios. Huge thanks to our partners for believing in our vision — we have huge ambitions to help studios and games unlock their full potential.
🌐 Welcoming Pragma Strategic Advisors: We’re thrilled to welcome two industry veterans as strategic advisors to Pragma: Richard Browne, longtime gaming executive at Universal, THQ, and Digital Extremes, and the inimitable Michael Vorhaus, CEO of Vorhaus Advisors, a trusted Board level member and advisor across media, tech and games. Their experience across publishing, product development, and go-to-market will be invaluable as we continue to scale both the Engine and FirstLook. Welcome, Richard and Michael!
🆕 Coming Soon - Connect: We’re excited to introduce Connect — our new cloud-based service designed to simplify development by connecting your game to essential features and services. Here’s some of what it includes:
Discord SDK Integration: Seamlessly integrate the latest Discord SDK to offer free voice and text chat.
Cross-platform Friends List: Show presence, enable invites, and connect players across every platform without extra work.
Unreal UI Components: Get ready-to-use UI for features like friends lists that meet all platform certification requirements.
Plus, by connecting to FirstLook, you unlock even more capabilities:
Automated account creation and linking
Event tracking (e.g. playtime)
In-game item grants to reward your most engaged players
If you’re interested, contact us here!
👀 Launching FirstLook
Pragma launched FirstLook.gg, the leading playtesting and community management platform. With FirstLook, developers can easily onboard players, manage their communities, and run playtests all in one place. We are quickly becoming gaming’s first native CRM. FirstLook now powers 40+ studios and communities with 1MM+ players including studios like Dreamhaven, Bonfire Studios, Remedy Entertainment, Playable Worlds, WOLCEN Studio, and more. We ship new features every week, so join our Discord, follow us on X, or follow along on our changelog to learn more!
🌍 Upcoming Community & Industry Events
Want to connect with Pragma IRL? Check us out at these upcoming events.
EU Online Services Summit (May 7-8 2025): We’re excited to host the EU Online Services Summit in Amsterdam with i3D.net, bringing together engineers and leaders from across the European game development community. Our 2025 headline speakers include Mauri Attisani, CTO of ESL FACEIT Group, Adam Fletcher, former CTO of Mediatonic, Dmitri Brevdo, Head of Game Services at Saber Interactive, and more – who all will be sharing their experiences building live-services for major franchises and events.
Gamescom (Aug 18-23): Reach out to connect with us at Gamescom. If you’re planning to attend and want to connect about FirstLook or the Engine, we’d love to meet—drop us a line!
