Lunchtime Discussion: Betas

Yesterday we talked about demos, so today it makes sense to move onto betas. A lot of you talked about betas selling you games in the comments yesterday, and that’s really interesting to me. Until this generation it didn’t really seem that betas were ever used to promote a game. To me a beta still shouldn’t be used for promotion, it’s to test a game.

Closed betas are obviously better for actually testing a game, you can filter applicants, and exclude them if they don’t actually help you to test. Unfortunately with the huge number of consoles that are now online games need real network load tests. Bizarre Creations have stated that this is one of the key reasons they’ve put out the Blur beta, along with balancing the power up system. These are the exact reasons that a beta should exist for a game, to make sure that the final product works when it’s released to paying consumers.

The problem is that I’d guess that about fifty percent of betas now are purely for publicity rather than actually testing anything on the system and developers are starting to see it that way. Modern Warfare 2 was released without a demo or beta as Infinity Ward didn’t believe that the game needed the publicity. However a beta for actually testing and improving the game’s multiplayer would have helped a lot with the huge failure of the game’s PS3 launch, and the significant number of exploits that were discovered by players in the wake of the release.

So what are your thoughts? Do more games need open betas for testing? Have betas largely become part of a games publicity cycle? Are they just advanced demos?