How to playtest remotely in 2022?

Playtesting is a well-established industry standard on how to ensure all your games are made properly without any bugs and with the best player experience. Today's testers are highly skilled people and it's hard to find the ones with great talent, responsibility and most importantly trust. With remote work enhancing in the last few years, it is important to keep with the trend even in the gaming industry. Ideally providing your testers with a ready made testing environment only using their login information and letting them work from anywhere they need. But what is the solution that can technically, economically and securely support it? We believe that Virtual Game Studio is an answer, but firstly let us share with you the advantages we see:

Remote environment at one click

In the same way that you are providing the development workstations to your developers, imagine that you will do the same procedure with your game testers. You will just share with them the login information and let them test the latest version of the game.Ready made environment in one click.

This solution is providing you a great advantage to keep your testers working for you, as they can work from anywhere they need from any device. The compute power is handled by you, just as needed. You can easily scale the computing power of each remote desktop, but also the number of desktops with the great advantage of pay as you go models. Imagine it as a Nvidia GeForce, but your private one.

Fast feedback loop

Once you’ve invested in building a reliable, fast, and secure CI/CD pipeline that gives you confidence in the quality of your builds. It is time to provide the latest version to your testers. But how to do it at the same speed as you are building the game thanks to your CI/CD pipeline?

The answer is continuous testing, which adds the important quality into the entire process of game development. Make the process of building, testing and releasing game versions more efficient and get it into the hands of users more quickly, by adding the fast feedback loop from your testers.

With virtual playtest desktops you can easily push the new version of the game to your testers without any delays. They will just start the game and test the new features. And if they find any bug, you can fix it and test the new version right after. No delays that will threaten the release of the game.

Provide the latest game version without leaking it

Having non-disclosure agreement with you testers is a must, but that is not enough. They are skilled and they are capable of sharing part of your games even without any footprints behind. When sharing the game with testers you want to avoid sharing the actual game build. And ideally be in control of the whole process.

With virtual desktops, your testers proceed to test the game in an environment that they are not in charge of. There is no way they can get to the code, but also there is missing the option to take print screens. You can also set the camera on, to have control over the playtester surroundings and see the actual reaction of the player. Because Virtual playtest environment runs in the Cloud you can easily employ more sophisticated User research techniques, like using vision AI to automatically mark the player emotions and detect player behavioral patterns.

So, how to playtest remotely in 2022?

As described above, Cloud computing is the answer here. We believe that remote work in the game development industry is something that can bring a lot of advantages, when done correctly. It is somehow used for building the game, but the testing part is also crucial. Playtesting can work simultaneously with game development. And there is another plus on this approach. A big one - security!

Desktops securely embedded in the cloud, helps you protect your valuable assets and prevent data leaks, breaches, and hacks. You achieve full compliance and auditability seamlessly. The security is solved out-of-the-box including fine-tuned identity management, access control, logging and tracing. Data leakage protection is configured to suit your needs or needs of your particular partner. No data ever leaves your environment without your permission. Your artists and editors can comfortably work from wherever they are, while you're not making any compromises when it comes to security.

Our Virtual Game Studio is ready to support your game development. Check out our case study with 3 Bohemians.