Side (formerly PTW or Pole To Win), a games services company with a London headquarters offering quality testing, localisation, player support, audio and art.
Side, formerly known as PTW (Pole To Win), is a games services company. It began with quality assurance, localisation, localisation testing and player support, and has added audio production, co-development, art and datasets. In 2025 it partnered with Razer on an AI-powered testing and playtesting product.
Another profile describes the aim as making every gamer's experience as good as possible, treating players as part of its community, with an "all-minds-on-deck" approach that draws on its global workforce. Its chief executive since 2019, Deborah Kirkham, describes Side as an enterprise games services company offering technical and creative solutions.
Side is headquartered in London. Its parent, PTW Holdings, is listed in Tokyo. Pole To Win Europe was set up in the UK in 2012 and became Side International UK in 2025. The original UK audio company SIDE was established in 1995 and joined PTW in 2015, and the group also has a Glasgow site through a 2012 acquisition. Its Oxford Street London office hosts a motion capture studio run with Imaginarium Studios, which can record faces, bodies and fingers for up to two characters while capturing dialogue at the same time.
It employs about 2,000 people across Europe, Asia, South America and North America, and a profile says it has over 650 developer and publisher clients. The group around it includes studios such as 1518 Studios and Entalize. A profile says it offers a pension.
The roles span testers, localisers, audio engineers, designers, producers and client managers. Imaginarium's Alex Hill described the London mocap space as "optimal for our gaming clients". The London facility lets a developer capture a performer's body, face and fingers and record the voice at the same time, so narrative scenes can be made in one place. The Wikipedia entry also mentions a Bangalore site from the 2012 e4e acquisition, and says Teppei Tachibana is chairman. Treat office details with some care, as one job-board profile lists different headquarters from the ones given on Wikipedia. Pole To Win America, now Side, was incorporated on 5 August 2009 and opened its first studio in Silicon Valley. The 2025 Razer partnership is for an AI-powered QA and playtesting product, which shows testers and engineers working side by side on new tools.
Website: www.side.inc
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