FirstLook Team
· 5 min read
Some partnerships just make sense. Today we are proud to share one of them: Team17, one of the most recognizable names in games, has chosen FirstLook as its exclusive playtesting platform across its entire portfolio.
If you have played games at any point in the last three decades, the odds are good that you have played a Team17 game. Worms. Overcooked. The Escapists. Dredge. Golf With Your Friends. Hell Let Loose. Behind every one of those is a studio that has always understood the thing we care about most: great games are built with their players, not just for them. This partnership is about making that easier to do at scale, across a whole catalogue of beloved titles.
Who Team17 is#
Founded in 1990, Team17 is one of the most respected publishers in the industry. Over more than three decades it has created and published a run of globally loved games, from the chaos of Worms and Overcooked to the quiet dread of Dredge and the tactical intensity of Hell Let Loose. What ties that range together is not a genre. It is a track record of building games with strong, lasting communities around them, the kind of communities that only form when a studio genuinely listens to the people playing.
Staying relevant for that long, through enormous shifts in how games are made, sold and played, takes more than good taste. It takes a habit of understanding your audience and adapting to them, release after release. That habit is precisely what a dedicated playtesting and player feedback setup is built to support.
That is exactly the kind of team we built FirstLook for.
What the partnership means#
As Team17’s exclusive playtesting platform, FirstLook now supports the publisher’s playtesting and player feedback programs across its portfolio. In practice, that means gathering structured player insight, refining gameplay based on what players actually experience, and making more informed decisions throughout development and well beyond launch.
The real shift here is consolidation. Running player feedback across a wide slate of titles usually turns into a patchwork of disconnected tools and scattered channels, a spreadsheet here, a Discord there, a survey tool somewhere else. Bringing it into one platform lets a team the size of Team17 see its players clearly across every game, instead of stitching signals together by hand. Team17’s Phil Boylan framed the appeal around exactly that: a broad portfolio and a lot of passionate communities, kept in view in one place rather than spread across a tangle of separate tools.
Exclusive and portfolio-wide is the part that matters most. It means every Team17 title runs its playtests and feedback through the same system, so the publisher builds a real, cumulative understanding of its players over time rather than starting from zero with each launch. What one game’s community teaches them can carry straight into the next, which is a compounding advantage that a scattered setup can never give you.
Starting with Hell Let Loose: Vietnam#
The partnership is already in motion. It extends to Team17’s upcoming titles, including Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, the next entry in the studio’s acclaimed tactical shooter series, which opened PC playtest signups following its reveal at the Galaxies Showcase. FirstLook is supporting those playtesting efforts as development continues, so the team can bring genuine player feedback into the game early, while there is still time to act on it, rather than at the very end.
It is a good example of the whole point. A game like Hell Let Loose: Vietnam lives or dies on how it feels to the players who care about the series most. Having a proper playtesting setup in place from the start means those players are part of the process, not an afterthought once the game is nearly finished.
What it means for Team17’s players#
For the players, this is good news too. It means more chances to get hands on Team17’s games before release, and more weight behind the feedback they give when they do. The people who love Worms, or Hell Let Loose, or Dredge are exactly the people whose input makes the next game better, and this partnership gives them a clearer, more direct line into the studios building them. When a community knows it is genuinely being listened to, it shows up differently: more invested, more vocal, and more willing to stick around for the long haul.
Why this matters for how games get made#
This partnership is part of a bigger change in how games get made. Across the industry, more studios are choosing to listen to players earlier and more consistently, and to use what they hear to guide development and long-term support, not just to catch bugs in the final stretch. Player relationships are becoming a core part of building a game, not a marketing task bolted on at launch.
The payoff of listening early is not abstract. Catching what frustrates players in a build, months before release, is the difference between a quick fix and an expensive late pivot. It is also how you turn testers into advocates: players who were genuinely heard during development tend to arrive at launch as the loudest, most loyal part of the community, the ones who bring their friends.
FirstLook CEO Eden Chen sees Team17 as a model for that approach, calling the publisher “a shining example of how to do it right.” It is hard to argue. A studio does not sustain communities around games for thirty-plus years by accident. It does it by understanding its players, again and again, across very different kinds of games.
Part of a growing roster#
Team17 joins a fast-growing list of studio and publisher partners on FirstLook, which now supports more than 200 studios from indie to AAA. Across that whole range, the job is the same: give teams the tools to run playtests, gather feedback, and build stronger relationships with their players before, during and after launch. Studios from indie to AAA already use it to scale a tester base into a lasting community.
Seeing a publisher with Team17’s history and standards choose FirstLook as its exclusive playtesting platform is a signal we do not take lightly, and one we are grateful for. It tells us we are building the right thing for the teams who care most about their players.
Run your playtests on FirstLook#
Whether you are a solo developer preparing your first playtest or a publisher managing a portfolio of live titles, the same platform is here for you. Recruit and onboard players, gather feedback where your community already is, and turn what you learn into better games. It is the setup Team17 chose, and it is available to studios of every size.
Explore FirstLook and what it can do for your playtests, or get started free.
The announcement was covered by GamesBeat.