SoftwarePlatformsSteamSteam’s latest update promises better betas, barely a bundle of broken save gamesWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
SoftwarePlatformsSteamSteam’s latest update promises better betas, barely a bundle of broken save gamesWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Valve, YouTuber Mora Madness)
Pop quiz, hotshot: How do you install a beta version of a game on Steam? That’s right, you right-click the game you want to em-beta-fy, hit properties, go down to betas, potentially enter some kind of complex password that unlocks the branch you want, then select the correct build from a drop-down box.
A nightmarish process of almost dizzying complexity. Kind of. Okay, not really. It’s actually totally fine, but Valve is making it even easier nonetheless. A post on theSteamworks bloglast Friday alerted devs to the fact that they could now get their players into and out of beta versions of their games with ease. Smoother, faster, downright expeditiously.
In essence, devs can now stick a button into their game somewhere. Once clicked, Steam will reboot your game and relaunch it in beta-mode, tuned to whichever build players selected from the menu. Which is, I have to admit, a better system than sticking a call for testers in a blog post I’ll never read and crossing your fingers.
Plus, if you’ve ever gotten deep into an early access game, you’ll know the sheer pain that can come from a sudden update making mincemeat of your saves, forcing you to restart from scratch or—if you’re me—wander off forever, never to return to the game again. As Valve puts it, “trouble can arise when players with dozens or hundreds of hours of playtime find that their save file no longer works with the latest version of the game.”
None of this will take effect automatically, mind you. Devs will have to go in and plug the new APIs into their games, but it looks like that should be pretty easy (I say with the confidence of a man whose most ambitious coding project was an HTML website in middle school). Brace for better betas, brothers.
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