How it works
The overview shows games for which the last check found a playtest on Steam. A catalogue entry is not confirmation that you will get access immediately.
Process
- Checking the game's public page on Steam.
- Recording the title, description, genres and the game's public address.
- Comparing with the previous state of the catalogue.
- Building the static site from the last successful scan.
What “newly added” means
“Newly added” means that the first sighting of the game in the catalogue (first_seen) is at most 7 days old. It is not the game's release date and not an announcement made by the developer.
When a game drops out of the overview for a while and later returns, it keeps its original first-sighting date. It is therefore not reported as new again — repeating a new-entry announcement after a temporary outage would be misleading.
Open and limited signup
Steam Playtest lets a developer choose between two signup modes. These are not two kinds of game, but two ways of allocating access.
- Open signup: after a request on the game page Steam grants access automatically. You can play once the developer makes the test available; they may also pause or end it.
- Limited signup: a request puts you among interested players. The developer decides how many players and when to accept; Steam selects them at random from the signed-up group, possibly with restrictions by country. Acceptance is not certain and it is not necessarily a manual approval of each individual person.
Our anonymous check of a public page cannot tell which mode applies to a particular game. That is why we do not promise immediate entry or approval for individual games. Besides public signup, a developer may also distribute access using keys.
Source: official Steam Playtest documentation (Steamworks). Verify the rules and availability on Steam.
Limits
- Playtest availability and rules are decided by the developer and can change.
- Checking a public page does not prove what you will see after signing in to Steam.
- When a game disappears from the catalogue, that alone does not mean the test has ended.
- The time of the last successful scan is shown next to the data; if it is missing, it is not known.
Filters
Search, sorting and genre selection are stored in the page address. A link can therefore be shared and the same selection survives a page reload. Selected genres are combined with AND: a game must have all the selected genres.