Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Things can still go terribly wrong for developers that choose to expose their games to the masses at a premature stage in the game’s development. Although Scott Hartsman argued that big betas are still necessary for the AAA titles with the multi-million dollar budgets, developers need to be wary of allowing the public to see their vision in a state that isn’t worthy of their time. Like a leak of a blockbuster movie or a pirated draft of an upcoming sequel to a bestselling book, the audience may ultimately decide that what they see in the early version of the product is what the final experience may be like.

If we turn an eye back to NetDevil and Auto Assault, at their post-mortem talk on the game at OGDC 2007, Hermann Peterscheck and Scott Brown both stated that beta tests should simply be used for marketing and stress testing. A development team shouldn’t rely on beta testing to point out all the flaws in a game’s design, because that simply won’t happen. Technical problems can be ascertained through.

In a later interview, Scott reiterated this thought again saying, “I no longer believe that beta’s purpose is to find bugs. I think beta’s purpose is to market your game. I mean it is the only way you can find things like huge balance issues and what happens when a bunch of players do something you never expected. It’s certainly there to find those things, but if you’re running beta for a game and you have crashes and bad frame rates, it’s not good.”

So while late game testing remains an important part of the development process, game companies need to insure that there games are in a “finished” or “near finished” state before they ever unleash their products to the public. And the proof is easily visible in two prominent (and cancelled) NCsoft titles: Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault.

As the numbers slowly revealed a lackluster launch for Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa, the legendary developer announced that inviting too many individuals into his game’s beta test caused a large amount of fallout and lost sales. Here’s what he told Gamasutra in a late 2007 article:

“I actually think the biggest mistake was made not by the marketing department, but by the development team. We invited too many people into the beta when the game was still too broken.”

“We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn’t yet fun," he said, adding, "As we’ve begun to sell the game, the people who hadn’t participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters.”

Scott Brown echoed this sentiment in our late 2008 article with him:



And these thoughts are continued by our own Ten Ton Hammer premium members. When asked about their worst beta experiences, most of them didn’t cite “unpolished content” as their major concerns. Instead, concerns with “being lied to” and “client not running” were top among the responders:

“Worst beta experience, for me at least, was with AoC,” Condar replied. “Seeing that Funcom had basically lied to us about what was in the game. Even those of us in the closed betas weren't given the correct information. That and trying to get the client to run some days was like having a second job.”

“Vanguard,” Thansal stated. “It didn't run.”