14 DAY TRIAL // On Monday, it was revealed that there were beta keys for StarCraft II, the real-time strategy title made by Blizzard, reselling on eBay for more than 300 dollars, sometimes packaged with entire Battle.net accounts and World of Warcraft characters.
Sure, it's rare to see so much interest in the beta stage of a videogame but it seems that just as developers are less interested in delivering demos for their products, closed and open betas are emerging as tools, which can be used to generate hype, introduce players to a game and get important feedback.
As videogames grew bigger, demos followed suit and their enjoyment to time spent downloading ratio has plummeted. Nowadays, it’s normal to see demo versions of high profile games bigger than 1 GB that deliver about half an hour of fun and only show off a very small portion of the finalized game.
Demos also lack any kind of replayability and rarely allow the gamer to somehow express their thoughts about the upcoming game. I did not find out anything new from the demo for Dante's Inferno that I could not have picked up from news, developer interviews and, most importantly, video footage.
Betas are very different. They tend to focus on the multiplayer element and allow for much more replayablity even if only one map and a limited number of classes are offered. They tend to go viral and attract those types of players who are interested in the franchise and in the game type offered, which means that all feedback, encouraged, is meaningful to the developers.
Playing the beta of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 showed me the feel that the developers were aiming for and allowed me to see the pace of the game, something other sources could not inform me on.
The problem with betas is that they are not standardized. There are closed betas, which open up at a later time and where invites are wholly arbitrary; betas open to those who purchase another game and get a special code; betas open from the beginning; some that get quite significant changes as they go on, and others where the people behind the game do not reach to criticism and suggestions. If big publishers adopted an internal beta and demo policy, it could make it easier to conduct successful betas showing off the strong points of their upcoming titles while allowing for interesting interactions between future players and developers.