The Daily Grind: Are open betas necessary?

unfortunately, most open beta's are more of a marketing move...and players treat it as suck - more of a try before you buy. on a side note, after spending hours and hours getting a FFXIV beta key and installing the game, i played for 5 minutes before i realized how unfinished the game was...as well as it having atrocious controls which felt like the developer tried to map console gamepad controls onto a keyboard/mouse and horribly failed...except maybe not because you can't jump...really?

As other commenter's said Open Beta is a double edged sword.

1. When you have masses playing you will find every possible bug/glitch in the game, some will slip by but the more playing the more are found.

2a. This one is 80% why I play open betas. Most MMORPGs don't offer a free trial til a few months after launch. The game companies don't like having a trial because gamers will find out how badly made their game is. When their game is finally patched up and working good, they finally will release a trial.

2b. Buying a game without being able to play a demo of it is a bad decision. With the huge influx of MMOs coming out lately and seeing how many people blindly pre-order and in the end get burned on the game because it was rushed and buggy. This is why Open Beta is so important I believe. Being able to see the game, even if it is in "Beta" you will see what the game is gonna be like when its released.

I hope people who pre-ordered FFXIV, now after playing the beta will realize how bad of a game it is becoming.

tl;dr Open betas is basically a trial of the game before its launched. So if the game is bad you can save your money and not get burned.

Open beta is no such thing. It's free testing to anyone in return for getting to "play first". It's game company spin.

No, open betas aren't necessary - there are enough people out there who want to get into closed betas that you don't really need to open a title up to everyone for free just before launch.

However, open beta does show confidence in a title and allows for stress and compatibility testing (as others have indicated). Also, I don't see how you can unite marketing from any kind of beta process - the closer to launch, the greater the opportunity for players to work out if they want to pay to play what they are currently testing, or the information they pass to others about the game.

I cancelled my CE pre-order, and will not be playing this game until next year. I was in closed beta, and each week I kept praying that they would fix things. Honestly, don't even go with this if you plan on playing with the PC. Stick to the platform they built it for (PS3), because the PC version is really bad.

You can say the game was meant for casual players, but honestly I couldn't even find the effort to put forth into learning the intricacies.. AND i've had FFXI experience.

You can say the game was meant for hardcore players, but then I'd scoff at you while you spend 8 hours just walking, only to meet your week's cap.


I'm still raging over the stupid console port. I've never seen such a bad port, even after Infinite Undiscovery and Last Revenant.. TERRIBLE.

But... maybe that's just me. Good luck to all who are going to play.. I hear after level 15 things are way better. I don't know.. maybe i'll play earlier if I hear them developing a companion app ( *cough* http://www.massively.com/2010/09/03/pax-2010-arenanet-announces-guild-wars-2-app-for-smartphones-an/ *cough* )

If open beta is supposedly to test servers for launch, and it still launches for shit, there isn't any purpose to open beta.

I have no problem with using OB as a trial or demo. Its when people do it for Closed Beta it annoys me. Some people just sign up for as many CB as possible on the chance they get in then play the game for an hour, decide they dont like it then leave without giving any feedback, thereby preventing a genuine player from testing the game.

I really dont know why a publisher doesnt offer a 7 day trial at launch of a new game at a small charge (say £5/$5) then if the player likes the game and upgrades to the full version then they get £5/$5 off the box price - seems like a good compromise as the player gets to play the game before shelling out most of the money and the game still gets some revenue.

They do have meaning, and I'll use Champions Online as an example.

During Open Beta the dev team figured they had a problem because they had characters get leveled up to the max in almost 2 days. Had they not had open beta they would have never discovered this perceived issue, so they took a nerf bat to the entire game with a launch day patch.

Necessary? No. Advantageous to both players and developers? Abso-lutely. Getting to try a game for free, before it comes out, has sold a number of games for me. Developers get to do a soft launch of their product.

open beta is really just for hardware testing. i think maybe you (OP) need a better understanding of testing and what each phase offers the company making the game. i had a friend who was a payed game tester for sony so i have a pretty good understanding of each phase. i myself have only been in a couple closed betas and a few open betas.
If you look at some mmo launches that had problems at launch relating to server stability you will notice they had no open beta and that open betas are a relativley new element to mmos in general to help eleviate these issues prior to launching a game. some information that these offer can be misleading however as not everyone who participates in an open beta will buy the game at launch which could lead to an over abundance of servers.
It seems like the majority of people who want to test do so because they want to play the game NOW! , but there are some of us who apply to test because we like what the game is about and want it to do well. so getting in and trying our best to break it is priority #1.