Tabula Rasa

[NiteFox]

Garriot replied with "It was bad in beta, but good now! Pleeease come back!"
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_in...tory=16490

I can't help but feel his logic is backwards with regards to the "we brought in too many beta testers", because if they hadn't then in all likelihood the game would be as bad as it reportedly was in beta at retail.

So then instead of having a bunch of angry beta testers unwilling to give the retail a try, you've got a lot of angry customers who shelled out cash for the privilege to play a broken game. With inevitable results ("zomg beta test my ass, diaf gariottt).

In my experience, you can never have enough beta testers for anything, unless your purpose is to cover up the fact that what you're presenting isn't that much cop anyway, and your intention is to try and hook as many early adaptors with said poor game and milk a substantial cash sum out of the poor uninformed saps.

Remember: It doesn't matter if a game is good or not, just as long as you have a significant amount of people laying down cash in the first retail phase you're entitled to bill it as a success, even if those people never renew their subscriptions beyond the first outlay. Korean MMOs have been running on this prospect for years, and it's amusing when a western publisher looks at some quite obvious turkeys, market the bajeezus out of them, then are forced to turn them into free-to-play games before the first run of retail boxes are off the shelf.

Edit: Speaking of the importance of beta testers; CCP, who do all the internal testing for EVE Online internally with about 6 staff for testers, released an update for EVE which eats XP's boot.ini file. Can't have too many testers. WoW has 9 million of them and still don't catch everything:)