Bounty Board vs FirstLook.gg for indie creator programs

FirstLook and Bounty Board both end in the same place, a creator playing your game and telling people about it. They arrive from opposite directions. FirstLook starts with your players: a playtesting and player data platform that grew a creator network alongside it. Bounty Board starts with the contract: a marketplace where a studio buys a defined piece of creator work and pays for it on approval.

We build one of the two, so read this like any comparison written by a competitor. Everything about FirstLook comes from its own pages, its documentation, and third party coverage, checked in August 2026, with its pricing and playtesting pages rechecked on October 8, 2026. There is one section where FirstLook wins outright, and we say so.

The direct answer

FirstLook is a player relationship platform: playtesting, NDAs, surveys, sentiment analysis, player analytics through Unreal and Unity SDKs, and a creator CRM tied to its public creator directory, creators.gg. Its free plan covers playtesting for up to 500 testers, retention tracking for up to 100,000 player profiles, a playtest listing on player.gg, and a creator program listing with key handouts. Attaching cash rewards requires Creators Core at $299 per month billed yearly or $349 monthly, plus a 15% commission.

Bounty Board offers key-only campaigns with optional coverage for a $29 listing fee, plus paid campaigns for defined creator work. You post a campaign, creators apply, and approved keys are delivered automatically. On paid work, you approve the finished deliverable before payment is sent. It also runs playtest campaigns: testers play your game for a set time, answer up to six questions, and each report you accept pays a flat fee. The standard fee is 10% on each side of completed work, with no subscription; cash campaigns have no listing fee.

Choose FirstLook when playtesting needs research tooling, such as NDAs, surveys, and sentiment analysis, or when player retention data is part of the same job as creator coverage. Choose Bounty Board when the job is a contracted piece of creator work, a ranked competition, or a paid round of playtest reports, with no platform bill between campaigns.

Quick comparison

What FirstLook is

FirstLook began as a playtesting tool built by two indie developers, and was acquired by the gaming infrastructure company Pragma in 2025. FirstLook 1.0 launched in February 2026 as something much wider: playtests, feedback, sentiment analysis, player analytics, rewards, and creator campaign management in one place, with over 100 studios and publishers named as users, including Remedy Entertainment, Avalanche Studios, and KRAFTON. GamesBeat later reported that Sega adopted the platform across its portfolio.

The creator side is the newest part. creators.gg launched on August 4, 2026 with IO Interactive and Brain Jar Games as launch partners and more than 10,000 creators signed up during its beta. Creators browse listed programs and campaigns, apply, and earn rewards as they hit viewership goals, a model FirstLook calls a battle pass for streaming, where qualification comes from performance, not follower count.

On the studio side, the creator product is a CRM: list on creators.gg or import your own roster, filter by platform and audience size, run built in application and agreement flows, distribute keys, and track coverage.

What Bounty Board is

Bounty Board is narrower on purpose. A campaign is one object: a game, a brief, an end date, and a way to earn from it. A competition instead ranks entries on a leaderboard and pays the top finishers when the ranking closes.

There is also an Arcade, where a studio hosts a browser playable build a creator can play and link in one click. Eligible Arcade studios keep 90% of finalized ad revenue attributed to their game, settled monthly via Stripe once the $50 minimum is reached. Arcade analytics cover plays, unique players, session length, returning players, and traffic sources. Playtest campaigns pay testers for reports on a build, covered in the playtesting section below. Bounty Board does not have FirstLook's NDA workflow, survey tooling, player CRM, or sentiment analysis.

Pricing, compared honestly

FirstLook sells subscriptions per product line above that free plan. As of October 2026, its pricing page starts cash rewards at Creators Core: $299 per month billed yearly, $3,588 for the year, or $349 monthly, which also unlocks creator browsing, invites, and coverage tracking. Creators Pro is $1,499 per month billed yearly or $1,999 monthly and adds the battle pass and leaderboard, cross platform keys, and livestream detection. Both carry a 15% commission. Playtesting and analytics are priced separately again.

The commission sits outside the creator reward. FirstLook's payouts documentation explains that a studio funds a creator budget in advance, with the 15% fee and Stripe's processing fee added on top of the amount entered. Fund $1,000 and creators can earn the full $1,000 while the studio pays roughly $1,183 at checkout. The fee never comes out of the creator's payment.

Bounty Board has no subscription, and a campaign is funded up front too: the studio pays the budget plus a 10% fee when it posts, and anything not paid out, fee included, comes back when the campaign closes. Creators pay their own 10%, so a $100 task charges the studio $110 and pays the creator $90.

The per dollar rates are closer than they look. The gap between what a studio pays and what a creator receives is about 18% on FirstLook and 20% here. The creator keeps more there, the studio pays slightly less here, and the subscription is doing almost all of the work in this comparison. Core buys real things: the CRM, the invites, the tracking. But if you run two campaigns a year, you are paying $3,588 for the privilege of paying creators. For a first budget either way, see what it costs to hire gaming creators.

Where the creators come from

This is the clearest structural difference, and it is not in our favor. FirstLook has a directory: creators.gg lists programs and campaigns publicly, creators browse and apply, and on paid tiers a studio can invite people directly. A free listing surfaces your game to that network, though what you can offer through it is keys, not cash.

Bounty Board has a public creator directory, but campaigns still depend on creators applying. FirstLook reported more than 10,000 creators signed up during beta; Bounty Board had 261 creator profiles when checked on August 27, 2026, and its homepage reports 20 creators with completed paid campaign work. What the application flow buys is intent: everyone who applies has read the brief and wants that job at the stated price. For the wider field, see our rundown of gaming influencer platforms.

What happens after the key goes out

Both platforms deliver a key, then watch for content. They watch differently, and pay differently.

FirstLook tracks automatically. Its documentation states that Twitch is matched by game, YouTube by channel, and TikTok by hashtag, and only those three are detected automatically: anything elsewhere is linked by hand. Goals are milestones that fire once or performance goals that repeat, measured on views, uploads, stream duration, average viewers, or hours watched, and the reward unlocks when a creator hits the number. Live listings on creators.gg show the shape: a rate per thousand views, a maximum payout per creator, a minimum view count, a two week window.

Bounty Board inverts the order: a creator applies to a brief that already names the work, the reward, and the deadline. Keys are delivered automatically to the creator's campaign chat when you approve their application. Payment is sent to the creator's Stripe account when you approve the finished work, and Stripe holds the payout for 7 days so disputes can be resolved first. Every campaign is funded up front through Stripe when it is published. The funds are held by Bounty Board, creators are paid from that budget as work is accepted, and any unused budget is refunded to the studio with its share of the platform fee, less Stripe's processing fee on the refund, when the campaign closes. Campaign rules require creators to disclose paid work and free keys in the content itself, and forbid paying for a positive opinion or rewarding storefront reviews.

On detection we are behind. View based bonuses and results based payouts are measured automatically for YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok, with Instagram and TikTok views read through the creator's connected account, and work on X and websites is reviewed and approved manually. But the creator submits each post to us. Nothing finds coverage by game, channel, or hashtag the way FirstLook does.

Playtesting: a research platform against a paid round

If playtesting means research infrastructure, FirstLook wins this section outright.

Its playtesting product distributes keys across Steam, Epic, PlayStation, Xbox, Apple, and Google Play tied to real player accounts, gates them behind click through NDA acceptance with an audit trail, runs surveys in Discord, in game, or on the web, and clusters sentiment by topic from surveys, Steam reviews, and Discord channels. The free plan covers 500 testers and retention tracking for up to 100,000 player profiles. Playtesting Core raises that to 5,000 testers for $199 per month billed yearly, with no commission on playtests.

Bounty Board runs a narrower kind of playtest. A studio picks Playtest in the campaign builder and sets the minutes to play (1 to 240), up to six questions, and how many testers it wants. Each report you accept pays a flat fee of at least $5, or testers get a game key instead of cash. Testers are gamers and creators who are 18 or older, unless you limit a playtest to creators, so a tester does not need a channel; anyone joining a paid playtest connects Stripe first. On a game published in the Arcade, play time comes from the tester's own play sessions, and a report short of the minimum is refused; outside the Arcade, the tester states their play time. Ten testers at $10 a report charges $110 when you publish, each tester receives $9, and any unused budget is refunded when the campaign closes. How playtests work has the full flow.

What a playtest here does not have: NDAs, branching surveys, automatic session recordings, sentiment analysis, a player CRM, or tutorial funnel and cohort tools. It gets real players through your build and answering your questions, paid per report, and testers can attach their own screenshots or clips to an answer. A studio that needs formal research on why players leave the tutorial should use the system built for it.

Choose FirstLook if

• You need playtesting infrastructure: keys across platforms, NDAs with an audit trail, surveys, and sentiment analysis.
• Player retention and in game analytics matter as much as coverage, and you can integrate the Unreal or Unity SDK.
• You want content found automatically on Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok, with no link for the creator to submit.
• You want a public directory creators browse and apply to, starting with keys on the free plan.
• You run creator activity continuously across a portfolio, so a subscription amortizes.

Choose Bounty Board if

• The job is a defined piece of work with a brief, a deadline, a review step, and a price, paid only when you approve it.
• You do not want a subscription. You pay 10% on top of work you accepted, and nothing in a month when nothing ships.
• You are running a ranked competition, a speedrun or high score event, with the prize pool funded before entrants invest practice hours.
• Your game is browser playable, so a creator can play and link it immediately. See playable game marketing.
• You want a paid round of playtest reports: a set play time, up to six questions, and a flat fee for each report you accept, with play time measured on Arcade games.
• You want public earnings receipts, so you can see what a creator has actually been paid before hiring them.

The honest summary

FirstLook is the larger, broader system, solving a bigger problem than we are. If a playtest needs NDAs, surveys, and sentiment analysis around it, its playtesting makes it the stronger fit, and its free tier is genuinely generous.

Our own weaknesses are real: a much smaller creator network (261 creator profiles as of August 27, 2026), playtests without NDAs, survey tooling, or sentiment analysis, no player CRM, and no automatic content detection, since creators submit each link themselves.

Run research playtests where the research tooling is. Pay for a round of playtest reports, or buy the specific video, where the work is contracted. The Woovit alternatives rundown covers five platforms including this one, and the studio overview covers campaign setup from posting to payout.

Sources worth reading

• FirstLook: Pricing
• FirstLook: Creators and Content
• FirstLook: Playtesting and Feedback
• FirstLook: About
• FirstLook docs: Metrics, statuses and payouts
• FirstLook docs: Creator campaigns
• creators.gg: creator programs and campaigns
• MCV/Develop: FirstLook 1.0 launch announcement
• GamesBeat: FirstLook teams with Sega on playtesting platform and player CRM
• Mobidictum: FirstLook launches creators.gg
• Net Influencer: FirstLook launches Creators.gg to connect gaming creators with studios