Richard Garriot on Tabula Rasa:

He continued, “And the people who did participate in the beta, we’ve had to go back to and say ‘look, look, we promise: we know it wasn’t fun two months ago, but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.’ We’ve had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process.”

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16490


File under "No Shit".

Personally, i think beta's as a marketing tool has gotten out of hand in the last 2 years or so. A few weeks ago I posted a question to Scott's (Gallenite) blog entry about Betas here:

http://www.hartsman.com/2007/09/21/small-interview-about-betas/


I asked (in relation to betas in the comments):

Do you think it “marinates” your content too early (before prod/live release) to where it mitigates some of the excitement that would have traditionaly (before mass-beta crazyness of the past few years) been associated with launch day? Or do you think this is just a function of how many people are in beta vs how many people you guys think would initially be pruchasing the product (ie if 20% are in beta it isn’t a big deal, but 80% is a different story?)


Unfortunatly I never got a reply. I would love for Scott (or Bruce) to follow up on that question.

OK, this is my take on it....see if it makes any sense. Sometime me writing something down doesn't really come out right...hopefully this does.

OK.... So a couple of years ago teasers would come out on CDs and you could "test" the game a little and try it out. Well that was ultimately pretty expensive. They would print the CD, ship, market it....behind the door testing and fix the problems as they went and rereleased at launch. Overhead was probably pretty damn expensive.

Well now, with bandwidth thresholds of the frickin' USS Enterprise at warp speed and immediate feedback from its playerbase... and obviously the quickness of the spread on game information and reviews, they can also instantaniously release fixes and do not have to do anything else more than host the game on a server, and let the end user download it....tease them a little and then they can focus their efforts on mainstream marketing keeping it seperate from development revisions to tweak the game to increase its efficiency and launch day flawlessness.

Remember when Vanguard launched and they made the NOOBIE area so graphically impressive, but they didn't keep that same focus to the remainder of the game...and then they got busted when people started to realize it? That's the downfall here..... they put so much effort in the "tease" that it does not carry over to the rest of the game trying to hook people and get rave reviews.