Posted in: Games, Valve Corporation, Video Games | Tagged: Steam, Steam Playtest, valve

Valve Reveals A New Feature For Developers With Steam Playtest

Valve Corporation revealed a new addition to Steam for game developers as you can bow try out your game with Steam Playtest. This system is the company's way of giving you a way to set up your game on their system without making it officially live and testing out everything related to their system. Essentially allowing you to invite players to test a game without having to manage keys or an external mailing list. You can access the content and tools on your Steam store page and grant access directly through Steamworks. It's an interesting development tool for their side of things, but we won't know how it will all work out without extensive testing from multiple developers. YOu can read a snippet of the info about it below.

When you're ready to end your playtest, you can easily deactivate it- which will remove the Sign Up option from your game's store page, and remove the Playtest from players' libraries. Behind the scenes, the actual download-and-play experience is happening on a secondary, supplemental appID, similar to how we handle Demos on Steam—so a player's ownership and playtime in the Playtest is separate from the real game. This means Steam Playtest won't cancel out or compete with Wishlists on your real game, and Steam Playtest owners cannot write user reviews. There's plenty more details and information available in the full documentation here, but in closing we wanted to provide two more important notes:

• These tools are in beta, subject to change, and not fully released yet. If you'd like to take advantage of Steam Playtest while it's still in development, use our contact form here to provide us with some background about when you want to start your playtest, and what kind of data you're hoping to gather from players. In the months ahead, we'll keep improving the tools and work towards a point where they are fully self-serve!
• Steam Playtest is free to use, for developers and customers. It doesn't support commerce or monetization, and is not a replacement for Steam Early Access. You could even use Steam Playtest prior to, or alongside, Early Access.

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