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Open Beta? More Like Free Trial
By Cameron Sorden | September 10, 2008
Can we stop pretending that an open beta is anything but a free trial? This complaint ties in with a post I made last year where I complained about the practice of using an open beta as a marketing tool. Whether they openly admit it or not, many companies do exactly that. I don’t know how you could stand there with a straight face and call your open beta anything but a marketing tool to promote your game when you’re handing out keys as an incentive to subscribe to Fileplanet. If it’s not a marketing tool, why do you give keys 
out at conventions? Why do you trumpet the number of beta players you have? Why do you purposefully invite community bloggers and journalists if you’re not actually prepared for criticism and dissection of your product?
Whether or not you intend it to be, whether or not it should be, and whether or not you also have an actual free trial planned for your game, players will treat your open beta test as a free trial. They’re testing your game all right, but they’re testing it to see if it’s any good — not helping you test it for bugs. It’s partly the fault of the industry and partly changes in player attitudes towards “testing,” but no one does much to discourage the practices that reinforce these ideas (other than to complain about how a beta should be about bug-squashing).
The problem is that I think developers see the beta test one way and marketing people and players see it in the way I just described. Two things need to occur to fix this:
1) We need to do away with open betas. They’re pointless. Everyone uses them as free trials while the developers complain that the game isn’t done yet. If it’s not done, don’t prance it out like a show pony for the kids to pet. If you need a stress test, and you clearly do, fine — take an afternoon and do one.
2) Online games need to launch with a free trial. Not implement one when subscriptions start flagging. Not tack one on 6-12 months out. Not add one at the end of the game’s life cycle in a last ditch effort to bring new blood in. Launch with one. This becomes easier and easier as consumers get used to digital distribution as a delivery mechanism and saves companies the hassle of dealing with retail box sales. Conversion to a full customer requires a simple credit charge in this case.
Tricking customers into buying a bad game and then not delivering a minimum quality product is a bad business practice — one that’s far too common in this industry. I’m looking at you, Funcom. As this space becomes more and more competitive, games that stick to the subscription model are going to need to start proving that they’re worth our $50-$70. I’m getting either far too cynical or far too savvy (take your pick) to just accept that we’re getting quality software on faith anymore these days. With no free trial offered, what do you expect us to do with the open beta? As for claims that open beta is really a “testing period,” show me one game that improved significantly between open beta and release based on the open beta feedback.
Regarding the post which sparked this discussion, I agree that people should be more courteous to one another, anonymity or not — especially when it’s one-way anonymity. I always try to be courteous, honest, and open-minded here, even when I’m criticising something or someone. But still, it’s the internet. Do you really expect anything less? I think Sid67 and Cuppy hit the nail on the head with all this brouhaha.
Topics: Blogosphere, Massively Multiplayer, Videogame Industry |
September 10th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Free trial? I think a lot of people, including myself, had to put down some cash in the form of a pre-order to get into open beta. You cannot condone how some people reacted to the EU WAR fiasco, but they paid their money and did not get what was promised.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Agreed. It’s even worse when people pay to get into an open beta, and then get told that they’re being given a “privilege” by being allowed to test. If you’re paying, it’s stopped becoming a privilege and started being a service. I think it’s completely fair to judge a company based on the value and quality of that service.
September 11th, 2008 at 8:15 am
They paid for the game, at live, and beta was a bonus. I understand the want to play a game as good/hyped (take your pick) as WAR, but at the end of the day, it IS beta. Does the final part of the beta have an additional bonus of being part of the marketing plan, sure, but that’s not the main point.
It’s a stress test, it’s having 50k testers breaking stuff instead of 100, it’s seeing how content holds up when said 50k attack it, its a beta.
Between gold and go-live, how many major changes/fixes are made? How much of that is based of the final push in beta? And would we rather deal with those issues first week of go-live, or the first week of open beta?
September 11th, 2008 at 10:14 am
That’s kind of irrelevant, though. The issue is that people use open beta like a free trial, marketers push open beta as a free/paid trial, and developers stress that open beta isn’t the live game.
But it doesn’t matter if it’s actually the live game or not, because people will still decide whether to buy it based on open beta. A stress test doesn’t need to last however many weeks that open betas normally do, nor would a 2-3 day stress test be offered as an incentive to pre-order.
Saying that it IS beta means exactly nothing. What it IS will be determined by how it’s used. If things aren’t “working as intended,” the developers should probably start tackling it differently.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:47 am
But in this case, the ‘open’ beta was for pre-orders only, so its not the usual ‘everyone come look’ open beta that most MMOs run.
And just because a few people run off and scream ‘Its not finished’ about a beta does not mean everyone logging in expect a finished product (and we are talking MMOs, which means it’s never a finished product), especially pre-order people. Early adapters are generally a bit more savvy then the masses, and I think Mythic understand that.
Why not use the rabid 100k or so fans to hammer the game at the end, revealing all the last minute bugs. That way, when the clueless one million+ log on, they WILL get a far more polished product then they would have had the beta not happened. That 100k will show up on day one, even if they bitch and post ‘I quit’ attention whore messages on forums.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:54 am
we are talking MMOs, which means it’s never a finished product
I hate that defense for poor quality at-launch MMOGs. Just because developers continue to work on the product after launch doesn’t mean you should be launching at 90% completion and finishing the work while customers pay.
I would define completion the same way you would define completion for any released, commercial game. The game should be reasonably bug-free and have all planned content that’s stated in the sale materials. If you’re only going to launch with content for the first 40 levels, that’s fine. But say so, then. Don’t claim you have 60 levels of content and plan to add the last 20 levels worth a few months out.
Also, if you’re going to launch at 90% completion (or preview at 90% completion), you need to expect to get reviewed and judged as a whole game at 90% completion. You can’t open your game to the masses, even if it’s through pre-orders, and then get upset that they don’t wait for a few months until you get “the rest of the stuff in” before they make judgments about your game.
September 12th, 2008 at 11:57 am
As for why they shouldn’t use that 100k group as last minute testers, it’s because that group doesn’t necessarily see itself as last minute testers. They see themselves as early players. This is what happens when you use beta as an incentive to pre-order and subscribe to your partners (like Fileplanet).
If they really wanted 100k players to squash last minute bugs in a proper beta, they should have the application process like the rest of beta and allow in people explicitly to test, with the understanding that they’re testers.
That’s not how betas work right now.
September 15th, 2008 at 11:35 am
It’s interesting. Warhammer is not the same game it was 2 months ago in closed beta.
I’ve watched it get polished right before my eyes.