Last year, PlaytestCloud added additional support for running playtests and game research on Steam games. One of the most common questions we hear from customers is “how is PlaytestCloud’s Steam playtesting different from Steam Playtests?”
We’re here to clear up that confusion and share a bit more detail about how Steam playtests work, as well as share a few interesting use cases for leveraging Steam’s native tools alongside other platforms.
To start, we’ll have to agree on what to call things.
- Steam Playtest: this will always refer to the Steam developer feature on Valve’s platform
- Playtesting Steam games: PlaytestCloud’s features for playtesting a Steam game using our platform
First: what is Steam Playtest?
A lot of the confusion around these terms might come from the fact that Steam describes Steam Playtest as a tool that “gives developers a free, low-risk way to get playtesting data for their game.”
Although this explanation means Steam Playtest is intended to gather “playtest data,” the feature itself doesn’t actually provide any playtest data. Instead, Steam Playtest is a way to distribute your game to beta testers through Steam’s infrastructure, and collect data by using community features and your own external tools.
Steam Playtest is free for developers to use, and allows for you to host playtest signups from your Steam store page, making the game accessible to playtesters and providing a way to share private Steam keys, without making the game public or live.
It’s a great way to get your game in front of players during early access (and even earlier!) and manage secure distribution of your build.
The benefits of Steam Playtest
Steam Playtest has made it easy for developers to limit access to their early game builds, and to create private Steam keys for playtesters, then revoke key access after testing. The distribution is simple as well: use the private keys or share a playtest link from your store page with your community on Discord, email list, Reddit or wherever your players are engaged. Recruit new testers via the Steam store page, and keep everything secure using Steam’s native tools.
The challenges of Steam Playtest
While the distribution and access are easy, without a community or audience to share the invitations or links, getting the game into your players’ hands is still a challenge. Additionally, there is no data or feedback collection built in.
Steam Playtest won’t give you any insight into what players do in a game, how they’re experiencing it, or if they enjoyed it. You’ll still need to create your own path to gathering feedback, and use other tools in conjunction with Steam Playtest to gather and manage player insights. While you can engage via Steam’s community tools, there is no structure to the feedback.
And, if you want video recordings of players playing, you’ll need to ask players to record themselves and then send the videos to you after they play.
Where do Steam Playtest and PlaytestCloud overlap?
Most game developers rely on multiple sources to gather data about their game. Even studios who run most of their research on PlaytestCloud’s Player Insights Platform™ still engage with a community and employ other methods for a robust approach to player research. And one of the greatest challenges we hear from studios is distributing their game builds securely.
It’s important to maintain control over who can access the game, and when. Most likely, you don’t want players who have tested the game to continue to access the build after they’ve finished their test. You can combine Steam Playtest with PlaytestCloud's steam playtesting features for easy and secure build distribution.
To manage access, you’ll create Steam keys in just a few clicks on Steam’s platform, then revoke their access on Steam following the test.
When running a playtest on a Steam game using PlaytestCloud, you’ll manage access the same way, but we’ll distribute the keys to players and walk them through the redemption process (you read more about how that works here). You don’t need a public signup or anything on your Steam store that indicates the game is in playtesting (in fact, you don’t need a live page at all).
This makes playtesting in-development Steam games easy PlaytestCloud. As another option for playtesting unreleased games with Steam Playtest , Valve recommends that you use Release Override Keys on an unreleased base app rather than going through a separate Steam Playtest app. Distributing Release Override Keys is also supported on PlaytestCloud. They also have several recommendations for minimizing leaks since Steam is constantly scraped for data and player profiles.
Playtesting Steam Games on PlaytestCloud
The benefit of combining Steam Playtest features with a games research platform like PlaytestCloud is that you’re able to distribute your build and manage access for players, recruit your exact target players, and gather player feedback with structured insights.
Building and maintaining a community of players is extremely challenging and time consuming. It can be expensive as well. But an often overlooked drawback to game communities is that the players who join them tend to represent a very specific persona: typically more hardcore players or those directly involved in building games themselves.
While that may reflect a portion of your target audience, relying solely on the feedback of the community (and quite often, the friends-and-family audience) could mean missing out on a piece of the feedback puzzle—or building the wrong thing entirely.
Using PlaytestCloud’s player panel, you can refine your target audience based on standard demographics but also with similar gameplay interests. It allows you to test your game with a different pool of players and compare the feedback to what your community provided.
You’ll also spend less time recruiting your players and convincing them to playtest, since the platform guarantees delivery of the exact number of results requested. That means if you request 10 players playing 1 hour each, you receive (yep, you guessed it) 10 recordings of at least 1 hour.
Of course, you can always order shorter or longer sessions, including multiple days to observe players continuing past FTUE. There’s also a 2-hour playtest option designed perfectly for playtesting the Steam refunds window. This helps game developers accurately predict churn and leverage the results to reduce the number of future refund requests—before the game is even released! You can read more about playtest lengths and the methods available here.
Watching players play your game is the most valuable, high-impact activity a game developer can take part in. We hear so many stories from our customers about the things they learn just from observing that they had never learned about in surveys or community feedback.
Analyzing the data from player recordings is also straightforward. Transcripts, AI-powered analysis and annotations speed up the review process and highlight themes and key areas in the player videos. If you don’t have time to watch all of your recordings, use these tools to see which moments to zoom in on and just watch the exciting parts.
Other considerations (and a few tips!) for playtesting Steam games
Already have a strong community, but need more structure for your feedback? PlaytestCloud allows you to leverage your existing community (rather than our own player panel) to run playtests via the platform at a reduced cost. This means their gameplay and feedback would be recorded and you’d have access to survey data, transcripts and AI analysis all in one place.
If you want to get feedback on something but don’t necessarily want to share it with your community yet, playtesting with the PlaytestCloud players is a way to do this discretely. Our panel is under strict NDA and are not able to share anything about the games they test.
We’ve also seen the new Steam Timeline feature, which allows players to record and share gameplay videos and clips. Players can add markers that show up in the video timeline, which makes the content more interactive. A savvy developer might run a Steam Playtest and integrate these features to encourage players to record themselves, and use those recordings as a playtest somewhat akin to how it’s done in the PlaytestCloud platform. You’d still need a way to collect and process the feedback (and recruit and encourage players to play), but it could be an interesting workaround.
If your game isn’t yet playable but you realize that early feedback is important, consider running a concept or prototype test first. Player insights are so crucial to making big decisions about a game, and it’s so much easier (and cheaper!) to fix issues before too much development time has been invested.
Hopefully, by reading this comparison of Steam Playtest and testing Steam games on PlaytestCloud, we’ve been able to articulate the key differences (and why it can be so confusing). TLDR: Steam Playtest is a fantastic addition to Steam and has allowed for the seamless distribution and access of games before release; PlaytestCloud takes that distribution a step further and gets your game directly to your target players, then collects and structures player feedback so you can make game you know will be successful.
