Steam gets new tools for game devs to offer players version switching in-game

Valve announced something that I'm sure a lot of game developers and players will appreciate: new APIs to allow developers to have version switching directly in their games!

Steam has long a way for players to manually opt into a Beta individually per-game, if one is available. This can be used for testing new features or for accessing previous versions. However the current system is somewhat obscure, and relies on you looking around various Steam news posts or forum posts for each game to know if there's a new feature Beta available, or if they provide an older version of the game you can switch over to via the Beta system.

Valve's announcement makes it clear that the idea of this new set of APIs is to allow game developers to present this to gamers directly in-game. Valve give some examples on why developers may want to use this like preserving game saves when making major changes to your game, something Paradox Interactive do with their various strategy games. Like this for Stellaris:

So with the new system, developers could just put this in-game directly.

As part of this, a recent Steam client update also shows you on the game page in your Library when you have a Beta picked:

Really seems like a nice addition that I'm surprised hasn't been a thing until now. Hopefully more developers will think about keeping older versions available now, especially with Valve suggesting it as a good idea in some cases.