Public beta or demo?

[Dog Pants]

PCG have put up an interesting article on beta testing today. It's not hugely in depth, but it raises the question of whether what we are shown as betas are really just demos for the sake of publicity. I've been saying the latter for ages now (probably not an original thought, I'm sure others here said it before me), but I think there's more to it than just that. The main point I thought of that isn't mentioned in the article is the way the players' opinions have changed towards betas - that sense of entitlement rife on the internet drives many to expect a full, polished game. I get the impression that MMONGs started that, and remember with rising bile the furor over Age of Conan and the nerd-rage on the PCG forums caused by them not reviewing the beta as the finished product.

What do you bummers think?

[Thompy]

I've never really been bothered about trying out demos or betas so can't say I have any great insight. But certainly it seems that the "beta" has taken the place of the demo. This has led people to expect demo quality from anything with a beta tag on it. Then when an actual beta comes along, said people can't handle the fact that it may be buggy or not fully representative of the final game and turn their rage up to 11.

TotalBiscuit sums up some stuff at the start of this. Infact, I stole what he said and just presented as my own opinion

[HereComesPete]

From a monetary standpoint this game arrives just before COD modern threefare. They can't fuck it up too much or all the whiners will jump as Co3D an iteration on the same engine with more polish so the bugs will be minimal.

I do honestly believe in the case of dice that this is a beta, we will see large changes to threef. Whether it's a day one patch of epic proportions or that they haven't even gone gold on the retail disc yet and have some serious EA backed distribution to get the millions of discs out last minute, I think we'll see that the feedback being given (apart from the usual throbbers banging on about stupid things they think are wrong) will affect the released game.

Unfortunately a lot of devs bring out a beta as a demo, going so far sometimes to put fine print stating this is not the final game, but still calling it a demo. To blur the boundaries like this generates confusion and mistrust and of course every dev gets tarred with this as a result of the actions of a minority because most of the wider internet dwellers are fucking mongs with that irritating sense of entitlement.

[Anery]

I suppose you would put out as polished a product for public testing as was possible. After all, news travels fast and bads news the fastest of all, we have all seen NDAs broken, flaunted and disregarded - new gets out, so make it good news. So yes, to a certain degree betas are demos - slightly buggy demos

[TezzRexx]

To me, a proper betas are always closed, so that they get a manageable amount of feedback that can be implemented into the demo for publicity, or to the final version.

Open betas, like the B33f one, scream pure publicity to me, as I don't think they'll be able to manage all the feedback and "testing" into worthwhile amendments.

[Dog Pants]

You could argue that there's soak and load testing to do, and that 12 million beta testers could get some pretty hefty balance data and locate a hell of a lot of bugs (that could be auto-reported back to DICE). In the case of BEEF3 I think it's mostly genuine beta - it feels like one, and I really don't think it's doing much good publicity-wise. The videos pretty much had everyone sold. I agree that open betas probably don't often give the devs bang for their buck though, as internet types are likely to just complain a lot without being particularly constructive, and any useful information is lost in the noise.