What's the idea here, to make it easier for lazy devs to push builds to paying customers without even stopping to play test it themselves first? Streamlined publishing makes negligence easier and more enticing.
Steam allows you to host and deploy development builds of your game for testing, without being released to the public.
Essentially you gain access to a private game on Steam with one or more Steam opt-in betas, to test different branches. It's common to use a CI system to build and then deploy to a steam beta branch.
The process of doing that is, however, a little bit... raw.
