They're Supposed to Suck

Stardock's president explains why Demigod beta sucks, says more betas should.

---

By Nathan Davis on 9 March, 2009

Game betas, these days, are commonly used as a method to measure or even drum up interest in a title more than anything else. It’s one of the reasons why I suspect the subscription-based World of Warcraft was so extremely popular when it first hit store shelves – a good majority of us had already played it, loved it, and begun recommending it. But in their modern form, these publicly-released beta versions are, for the most part, a finished game. Sure, some bugs are found and squished, but gameplay mostly remains unchanged through to release. Given the rate at which released games almost immediately require patches, it’s clear they aren’t widely used to the fullest extent.

Stardock, on the other hand, doesn’t do this with its beta testing. Instead, it releases game betas very early into the development process and, most intriguingly, with gameplay intentionally toned down to be less fun, so as to hone testers in on certain developing areas. The company’s president, Brad Wardell, believes more developers and publishers should follow this route because he says they’re confusing people as to what to expect of a beta. More specifically, he seems to think they make Stardock look a tad shabby.

“The biggest part of the challenge has been the evolution of betas in the PC game industry,” says Wardell, in relation to Stardock’s latest strategy game, Demigod. “Stardock has been doing public betas of its games since 1993 when the OS/2 version of Galactic Civilizations went into beta. We’ve always done it the same way – we put the betas out very early, very buggy, very non-fun and incorporate feedback into the game.”

The latest beta of Demigod: Marketing phase imminent.“For many years, no one else had these beta programs. But in the last couple of years, someone decided (wrongly IMO) that a public beta program would be a good marketing exercise. The problem is that when people joined the Demigod beta, many of them had only experienced those marketing betas which weren’t true betas.”

He goes on to mention how many beta testers for Sins of a Solar Empire understood Stardock’s long beta phase, as they had previously tested Galactic Civilizations. Because Demigod is a very different game, however, Wardell says it drew in a different bunch of testers, most of whom hadn’t participated in one of its beta programs. Instead, many of these people were familiar with the Supreme Commander beta, “which was a marketing beta where the game was largely done,” claims Wardell. “So when they picked up Demigod betas, they found that the game was buggy and utterly sucked.”

“The PC game industry needs to stop having those marketing betas because they completely alter the perception of what a real beta is,” says Wardell, explaining why the modern expectation for game betas to be fairly polished is not the fault of beta testers. “In Beta 1 and 2 [of Demigod], we intentionally messed with values in order to make the game not fun so that players would focus on the parts we cared about,” he candidly says. However, with beta testing coming to a close, he adds the game is now shaping up somewhat, saying “Suddenly there’s a growing buzz that hey, Demigod might be the strategy game to beat this year”.

“This Spring, we’re going to start the Elemental beta nearly a year before release. We are currently planning to not even have the graphics engine in Beta 1 but rather have players play on the cloth map so that we can drive home the point that betas aren’t supposed to be fun, they’re supposed to be solving specific problems,” Wardell says. But what about the specific problem involving public reception? If one wants to find out whether players will actually enjoy a game outside of play testers, that’s a damn good reason for beta testing, even if it does have the healthy side effect of also promoting the game.

I often find myself siding with Wardell’s and Stardock’s stance on issues, but I can’t help but see this as trying to separate one side of a coin into two. Most other games simply have a shorter public testing phase, seeing the release of a late beta version, rather than subject the player base to a good chunk of the tedious development cycle. I don’t think it’s fair to label these as release candidates, because considering they’re the first public testing phase, developers are feeling the waters to see if the game is captivating enough. It’s just more like beta 10 than 1.

• Login or register to post comments

---