MLB The Show 20 closed beta begins in January, here’s how to sign up

MLB The Show 20 will have a closed beta in January, Sony San Diego Studio announced today. Players who are invited will be able to play three online multiplayer modes, plus the player-versus-CPU mode of The Show’s Diamond Dynasty, an ultimate-team style suite of offerings that’s been around for about a decade now.

Signups for the PlayStation 4 exclusive are being taken right now. If you get in, you’ll be notified via the PS4 dashboard’s notification menu — not your email. Players will be notified on Jan. 13, 2020, and may download the beta client that day. The beta begins Jan. 14 and runs until Jan. 20 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

This FAQ has more, but note that if you do get in, Sony expects all players to keep quiet about what they see and do in the beta. That means no streaming or sharing of video or images on social media, or elsewhere. Breaking that rule can “result in your account being suspended from the beta, and possibly future tests or release versions of the game,” Sony says.

After years without much in the way of betas, sports video games’ bigger names have lately started staging them on an invitation-only basis. EA Sports’ Madden NFL and FIFA flagships have run private betas the past few years, and MLB The Show 19 ran a closed alpha last winter.

MLB The Show 20 will launch March 26, 2020 for PlayStation 4, with Chicago’s Javier Baez on the cover. Last week, Major League Baseball announced that it had reached an agreement with Sony to bring the 15-year-old PlayStation exclusive franchise to other consoles as early as 2021.