Askgar

I’ve noticed, especially with the relatively recent addition of Facebook applications to the internet, more and more games are using the term beta either as a way of demoing their product, or as an excuse for any problems that may occur during the game, or with the servers.  From what I’ve seen there are two main abuses of the term beta I’ve spotted in recent online games, the “open beta” that occurs around one month before launch of an MMO and the releasing of a game onto the internet and sticking beta on it as an excuse for problems that occur.

The first of these, the so called “open beta”, doesn’t seem to be a beta test at all, more like a preview event for he game, often allowing people to give the game a try for a couple of weeks, decide if they like it and then purchase it the next week when it is released.  I personally have nothing wrong with this as a concept, however I would prefer the term “open beta” not be used, calling it something like a preview event, or even a pre-release demo period, would seem more appropriate to me and better sum up what it is about.  Usually by the point a game is in “open beta” the game has already gone gold is getting ready to be shipped, it is unlikely many suggestions, other than major bug fixes, will be acted upon during the open beta period, and just as unlikely people playing in the “open beta” will actually file bug reports.

The other misuse of the term beta I’ve noticed a lot on Facebook games, the usage of the term beta as a pre excuse for any problems that occur (so that any problems can be blamed on its beta status), initially I naively believed these applications to genuinely be starting off as a beta and then transitioning into a fully “gold” application, however many of these are STILL in beta over one year on (Pet Society being the first one that springs to mind I’ve experienced), to me this signals a problem, not in the game as it has the occasional glitch (a problem with being a flash application I believe), but in the terminology.  This is now a released game in my eyes, along with many other Facebook applications using a similar method of launching, and as such should no longer have the beta label.

What I feel is even worse is that despite the application apparently being in beta, i.e. an unfinished state, most of these applications are perfectly willing to sell you virtual items for real money that could just disappear at any moment, should there be some sort of glitch causing items to go missing (it does happen in these applications), and often because the developer has another 10 games of very similar function it can be difficult, if not impossible, to track down the developer and complain.  The forums then become the focus of attention for these problems but as is often said:

The forum is for discussion of the application/game/… not account specific issues, please contact the developer/admin/… directly

In my eyes there are two choices here, either remove the beta tag, which is often not be a problem as they should be out of beta by now already, or they should not put the ability to spend real money on virtual goods until it has been released, instead of trying to monetise it before it has been fully tested.

This does however bring the problem of how do you test the “real money” functionality, I feel that the recent beta test of DDO:Eberron Unlimited did this well, to test the addition of the item shop they created a separate beta server and client, gave people a certain ammount of points to spend in the store, and then gave an incentive to anyone purchasing more points, by promising to add double the amount of points purchased during the beta to their release version account.  This allowed for the developers to test the item shop, and anyone willing to try out putting their own money into the game had an incentive to do so.

However, I expect absolutely none of this to change in the future, we will still have open betas just before release of a game to let people preview the game, and I’m sure we will also continue to get “permanent” beta games, especially with F2P games starting to become a lot more mainstream, and relying on item shops to make money, often during beta to ensure development can continue.

Finally I feel I should point out an interesting alpha test that is going on at the moment which relates to this topic somewhat, Love recently opened up signups for its alpha test but is going to be charging €3 a month to participate.  Despite my stance on games charging players for virtual items during beta, I have nothing against this, Love is being developed by one person and to keep servers up and allow people to test he will need money.  The developer is completely honest about the state of the game, in his own words,

As you may have noticed, im trying to under-sell and over-deliver here.

But due to anticipation for the game, and need to have it tested by a large number of people, has opened it up for anyone who wishes to test it out to pay a small fee and have a go. (For more information on the Love alpha check out the information page here).

As a final note I should mention that this post was in part thought up thanks to my wife, she has mentioned it to me with a number of applications on facebook which are perfectly happy to take your money, despite being in “beta” and admitting that problems may occur.