Is it possible to do a Private Beta without having to pay the $100 publishing fee and fill out the tax and payment info? We just need a way for our partners to try our builds.

In our situation, we want to have outside partners to test our build. It’s a game using EOS to be eventually released through the Epic Marketplace (no Steam). It’s enough people testing that it gets tedious to add people by hand to the members section of our product and give them all access to our private server with the build. If people got the game through an Epic private Beta sort of system, it’d probably be easier.
I imagine I’d need the Dev Sandbox and add Player Groups, but it looks like I’d need to go through the publishing process.
As an aside, does someone know of a link that helps me set this up? I couldn’t find links any other than the Epic documentation which lacks the holistic developer’s perspective (the docs give you a list of facts in different unrelated pages and you’re supposed to deduce how it all links together and relate to each other and what steps to take in what order).

Hi there,

The $100 submission fee would still have to be paid for to host any products on the Epic Game Store. This goes towards access to the Self Publishing Tools, hosting your build(s), and much more. All titles, whether beta release or full release all still have to go through the moderation process and meet Epic Game Store requirements.