Game Betas - The new "demos" (and why they're a terrible idea)

A little background: I'm basing my comments off my experience playing a few game betas on Playstation Network. Perhaps that alone makes me biased, but as long as we're all biased together, we can make the world a better place.

My first real experience with a game beta, as far as I can remember, was playing the MAG beta. I remember popping in and thinking "hmm, this is kinda fun! There are way more players than I'm used to, the battlefields are massive, there's potential." Something in the back of my mind squashed the critical thoughts I had, things like how the controls felt "wrong" somehow, and how the games seemed more often than not to stalemate over one or 2 control points. Because of MAG's squad focused play, I tended to respawn in the same spot, or with my squadmates, always around the same control flag area. Sometimes 45 minutes would go by with an eventual win by one side or the other because they defended through then entire clock or team's "lives" or whatever. The effect of this was that a player like me had just played for 45 minutes, in the same game area, with the same people.

Pictured: a scene that would absolutely never actually occur in MAG.

So even though MAG was this massive game, the game's setup funneled play into zones where certain squads focused, and it ended up being just like playing a normal shooter game. With poor controls. And lots of lag. And lackluster visuals. And absolutely zero nudity.

I forgave a lot of this and kept playing, getting excited for the launch of the game, trying to convince myself that IT WOULD BE BETTER, because of how much beta testing they'd done.

Then it came out. Reviews echoed exactly what I had felt playing the Beta. It hadn't seemed like the developers had been taking anything from the playtesting, the only changes seemed to be bugfixes and small meaningless "balance" changes. I realized I'd been bamboozled. The whole beta process was basically a giant demo, the end game being no different, just with more levels. You know, like a demo.

In the last couple of years it seems like a lot of the big game studios have gone the "super extra exclusive beta" route, allowing everyone and their grandmothers into second rate bug ridden quagmires of mediocrity. I believe they're trying to build hype for their game, but to me all it does is expose the problems with it earlier enough to dissuade anyone from pre-ordering except for 13 year olds who will pre-order any game with a gun plastered on the cover. Hence the multi billion dollar video game industry.

In this lowly blogger's opinion, the time and effort that goes into a beta would be much better spent just making a better game. In MY day, games succeeded or failed based on how fun they were to play. I don't remember a bit of marketing/demos/betas/or cocaine and hooker promo parties for Perfect Dark, but it still stands out as a beacon of happiness in an otherwise dismal fog of middle school memories.

It appears this has once again turned into nothing but a rant against marketing, a theme I tend to be gravitating towards lately.

Coming soon: if Apple had released Google+...