Find Playtesters for Your Game: 6 Places to Look

Where can you find playtesters for your game?

To find playtesters, combine a few free sources with one that scales: friends and fellow developers for the first rough builds, genre communities on Discord, Reddit and itch.io for players who like your kind of game, Steam Playtest once you have a store page, and paid playtest tasks when you need many fresh players quickly. Whatever the source, give every tester the same goal and the same short questions, so the feedback can be compared and acted on.

The hard part is rarely finding people. It is finding people who match your audience, getting them to actually play, and getting answers more useful than “it was fun”. This guide covers each source, its limits, and how to structure the feedback. Testing an app rather than a game? How to get beta testers for your app covers TestFlight and the Google Play testing tracks.

Before you recruit: decide what this test is for

Every playtest should answer one or two questions. Write them down before you look for testers, because they decide who you need and what you ask:

• Does the first session work? Can a new player understand the controls and goal without help? You need players who have never seen the game.
• Is the core loop fun? Do players want to keep going after 15 minutes? You need fans of the genre.
• Is it too hard or too easy? Where do players get stuck or quit? You need a mix of skill levels, and data on where they stopped.
• Does it run? Crashes, frame rate and controller support across hardware. You need many different machines.

Then define a checkpoint: a point every tester should reach, such as the end of the tutorial or the first boss. It keeps sessions comparable and tells you who actually played.

Six places to find playtesters

1. Friends, family and other developers

They are the fastest testers you have, and the right ones for your first build. They will find crashes, unclear menus and missing instructions. Their limits are just as clear: they know you, want to be kind, may not play your genre, and after one session they are no longer new players. Use them early and briefly, then move on. Fellow developers are a better source of design feedback, and many game development communities run regular threads where developers test each other’s games.

2. Discord communities

Two kinds of Discord server help. Your own server becomes a home for players who want early builds, give feedback over time, and report bugs in a dedicated channel. Other servers, especially genre, indie game and developer communities, often have channels for sharing builds or asking for testers. Read each server’s rules before you post, use the channel meant for it, and give feedback to others in return. Do not pay or reward people for joining your server: Discord’s Platform Manipulation Policy prohibits “purchasing or inducing server joins”. How to get more Discord members covers growing a server within the rules.

3. itch.io

itch.io is a simple way to host test builds, including browser builds that need no download. According to itch.io’s documentation, a project can be a Draft, visible only to you and to people with a secret link; Restricted, available to people you give download keys, with an optional password; or Public, with an option to leave it unlisted in search and browse. That lets you share a private test with one group and a public demo with everyone, from the same place. itch.io’s community boards and game jams are also good places to meet players and developers who are used to playing early builds.

4. Reddit

Reddit has communities for game developers, for specific genres, and for sharing games to get feedback. Reddit’s sitewide rules ask users to follow each community’s rules, post authentic content in communities they care about, and not spam or manipulate votes. In practice, read every community’s rules before posting: many limit self-promotion, require a specific post format or flair, or only allow builds on certain days. Post a short description, a clip or screenshot, the platform, how long a session takes, and exactly what feedback you want. Do not post the same thing across many communities at once, and never ask for upvotes.

5. Steam Playtest

If you have a Steam store page, Steam Playtest is the most direct route to PC players. Valve’s Steamworks documentation describes it as “a free, low-risk way to get playtesting data” for a game. The facts that matter:

• The playtest is a separate app ID from your main game, so its playtime, reviews and refunds are kept separate.
• It does not get its own store page. It is listed as an option on your main game’s store page, where players can request access.
• You choose between a limited sign-up, where you accept players from the waiting pool in batches, and an open sign-up, where players are accepted automatically.
• It must be free. Valve states that it is not OK to charge players for access to a Steam Playtest.

Accepting players in batches lets you test a build with a few hundred people, fix problems, and then open it to more. Steam Playtest brings volume, but only from people who already found your store page, so pair it with community posts that point there.

6. Paid playtest tasks

When you need many fresh players within days, in specific countries or on specific devices, you can pay per completed session. The task asks players to download or open your build, play to the checkpoint, answer a few questions in writing, and send a screenshot as proof. Because you can set targeting, you control who sees it, and because each tester is new, you get true first-session reactions.

Keep in mind that paid testers play because of the reward, so they are best for questions about clarity, difficulty and the first session, not for “would you buy this?”. Approve honest criticism; it is the point of the test. And keep the task to play and feedback only: never ask for a store review, a rating, or anything else a platform forbids rewarding. Valve’s guidelines say: “Don’t solicit reviews in exchange for any games, DLC, money, or other rewards.” Can you pay for app reviews? covers the mobile stores.

How to structure playtest feedback

Unstructured feedback gives you a pile of opinions that cannot be compared. A short, fixed form gives you patterns.

1. Record the basics automatically where you can: build number, platform, session length, and how far the player got. Players are bad at estimating these.
2. Ask three to five questions, the same every time. Keeping the questions fixed is what lets you see whether a new build is better.
3. Mix one or two ratings with open questions. “How likely are you to keep playing, 1 to 5?” gives a number to track; “Why?” tells you what to change.
4. Ask about moments, not the whole game. “What was the most frustrating moment?” gets specific answers. “What did you think?” gets “it was good”.
5. Do not lead. “Did you enjoy the new combat system?” invites yes. “How did combat feel compared with other games you play?” does not.
6. Watch when you can. A recorded or streamed session shows where players hesitate, which they often do not mention afterwards.

How many playtesters do you need?

Fewer than most developers think, per round. In usability research, Nielsen Norman Group’s often-cited guidance is that about five users per round find most usability problems, because the same issues come up again and again. For a game, five to ten new players reaching the same checkpoint is a practical round size. It is better to run several small rounds, fixing what you learned in between, than one large round. Larger numbers matter when you are measuring something: how many players finish the tutorial, where most of them quit, or whether the game runs on many kinds of hardware.

Reading the results

• Count problems by how many testers hit them, not by how loudly they were described.
• Treat where players quit as the most important data point you have.
• Separate bugs, which you fix, from opinions, which you weigh against your design goals.
• Watch for what players do not mention: if nobody talks about your favorite feature, they may not have found it.
• Change one or two things, then test with new players at the same checkpoint.

Mistakes to avoid

• Testing only with friends and developers, who are not your players.
• Running the same testers through every build, so nobody sees the game fresh anymore.
• Asking open-ended “what do you think?” questions with no checkpoint.
• Waiting until the game is nearly finished, when big changes are too expensive.

Publishing a mobile game on Google Play from a new personal developer account? Plan for Google’s closed test first, as Google Play’s 12-tester rule explains. Once the game is ready to launch, How to promote a mobile game on a small budget covers the next step.

Frequently asked questions