How Proving Ground works

For players

Browse games by stage, genre and how they were made. Most games play right in your browser. After you've played for at least 5 minutes, your rating is marked as verified play, so developers and other players know you actually tried it.

Ratings are tied to the version you played. When a developer ships an update, the game page shows both the rating for the current version and the all-time rating, so improvements get noticed.

For developers

You can have up to 5 games listed at once. Your first slot is free forever. Extra slots cost $7 a month each (or $60 a year). Archiving a game frees its slot, and cancelling a slot never deletes a game.

Your dashboard includes a feedback inbox (reply to ratings and mark issues as planned or fixed), analytics, screenshots, and update posts that notify everyone following your game.

Upload a web build as a .zip (Godot, Unity WebGL, GameMaker HTML5, Phaser and plain HTML5 all work), link your Steam page, or both. Each upload becomes a new version with its own ratings.

Godot developers: export for Web with Thread Support turned off (the default in Godot 4.3 and later) so the game runs in any browser without special server settings.

AI labels

• Human-Made: no generative AI content in the shipped game.
• AI-Assisted: human-directed, with AI helping on some parts. The developer ticks which parts: art, code, music and sound, writing, or content generated live.
• AI-Created: most of the content was generated by AI.

Developers choose their own label. If a label looks wrong, use Report a problem on the game page. Games that are repeatedly mislabeled are removed.

Paid playtests

Developers can pay testers a flat fee for a structured playtest report: Quick Look ($5 to the tester, 20+ minutes of play), Standard ($10 to the tester, 45+ minutes of play), Deep Dive ($25 to the tester, 120+ minutes of play). The developer pays the tester fee plus a 25% platform fee, up front.

• Same pay whatever the opinion. Developers can only dispute a report for low effort (too little playtime, blank or nonsense answers), never for being negative. Our team decides every dispute.
• Private feedback. Paid reports go only to the developer and never count toward the public rating. If a paid tester also posts a public review, it carries a Paid tester badge.
• Verified playtime. Testers play in the browser on this site, so we know how long they played.
• Tester levels. Everyone starts with Quick Look tests. Accepted, useful reports unlock Standard and Deep Dive tests.
• Automatic acceptance. Reports the developer doesn't review within 72 hours are accepted and paid.

Testers must be 18 or older. Payouts go through Stripe, which verifies identity and handles tax forms.