Release Candidate by end of month?

[Power and Glory]

This is from Planet Half-Life by Pratt:

Several people are reporting to us that they have been in touch with Gabe in response to his "Steam" emails, and that Gabe has been revealing an RC (release candidate) by month's end.

I haven't had a chance to speak to Gabe yet, but I will confirm this with him as soon as possible.

Note: Do not confuse gold status or release date with RC. These are three different things.

[[CAKE]anonymity]

So whats a release candidate? A date when they will set the release date?

[Gwarsbane]

A release candidate is more or less final testing. Its done after beta testing when they think they have found all the major program/game crashing bugs.

There can be just as many or not more RCs then there were beta builds but that don't not happen often, usually that means it goes back into beta testing.

If after a couple weeks or a month they don't find any thing wrong that build of the RC will go for final production.

Its kind of like after you have put a computer together and installed all the software you are doing little tweaks to the system to get it working right.