Alpha and Beta Testing

Alphas and betas are a critical part of a game's development lifecycle. We understand the value of getting feedback early and often and involving your community early on. That's why we've built some awesome alpha and beta testing functionality for you!

As you develop your game, you'll constantly be making improvements. You want real-time feedback from players, and there's no better place for that than Discord. In the past, players would need to dig through menus to find out how to unlock test branches, as well as remembering secret passwords and typing them in correctly. Was that an I or an l? O or 0?

One of the cool features of Store Channels is their ability to grant a Beta Entitlement for your game. That means that while you keep your master branch safe and sound, users can test on beta-branch-please-ignore-bugs in an isolated test environment.

When you create a store channel in your server, you'll be prompted with a choice to make it a Beta channel. That will allow you to grant users entitlement to the non-master branch of your game when visiting the store page. When your beta period is over and your game is ready for release and purchase, you can brick/delete these branches if you choose, and prompt users to get the full game by putting up a new store channel that's not Beta.

So, you've started getting a bunch of fans into your server. Hundreds, thousands, millions! Uh, if you hit millions, let us know. Within your hordes of adoring fans lies your Trusted Testing Group (tm), the best of the best when it comes to feedback. Maybe you want to give them access to a special insider-only-private-beta branch of your game. You can, with role-based entitlement!

Store channels in Discord are just like any other channel in that they can have a set of permissions applied to them. What is special about them is that if they are set as a Beta branch, entitlement to that branch is tied to having permissions to view the channel. So, all your testers with a Beta Tester role, for example, will be able to get entitlement to the insider-only-private-beta branch. And, if they are later removed from that role, entitlement from that branch will be removed.

A scenario might look like this: you create a Beta store channel. Only users with role Awesome Tester can view it. Player A is an Awesome Tester. They can view the channel and get entitlement to the beta branch. Player A becomes inactive; you remove them from the Awesome Tester role. Player A loses entitlement to insider-only-private-beta

Role-based entitlements help keep your beta community active and interactive, while also providing a way to reward your biggest fans with secret access to special things.

If you want to push out access to your game at scale, rather than inviting people into your server and giving them a role, you can create gift codes in the Developer Portal! Gift codes are like game keys on other platforms that you might be familiar with, with an added bonus: the ability to specify the entitlement time window. That means that you can create codes for your game to give to everyone, but they won't be able to play until the VALID FROM date. Similarly, you can set a VALID UNTIL date on all your gift codes if you want the entitlements to expire after a certain time, removing access from players.

Note that the VALID UNTIL date will not remove the game from the user's library, but they will no longer be able to launch it.

Up to 25,000 gift codes can be created at a time. When you go to create gift codes, you'll notice there are a few fields for you to fill out. Here's what they mean:

• SKU: the SKU that you want the user to get
• Branch: the branch of your game you want the user to get
• Valid From: the start date at which the entitlement is valid
• Valid Until: the date at which the entitlement is no longer valid
• Amount: the number of codes you want to create (up to 25,000 per batch)
• Description: a short description of why you made the codes, so you remember!

Once you've made your codes, you can download the .csv that has them all in it, and distribute them however you'd like!