Indeed this is a good article.
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Indeed this is a good article.
Nice read, thanks for the link.
I remember well my AoC beta testing days, Funcom really never listened to us beta testers. I gave up on the testing because of that damn patcher program. It uses/used an html page for version checking, thing is that i am behind a transparent proxy and the patcher would keep getting the damn cached version of the page.
Nails the point.Quote:
Remember, the months toward the end of the dev cycle are the most expensive ones by far.
Mostly those costs are seen as linear; They aren't though,
they are exponential, with less and less presentable "impact" on the finished product (which still can be crucial in a game that should hold out several years).
When they are handled linear regardless of the quality of the product, you hit a wall with full speed just within the beta phase.
It's just a result of mismanagement and the failure of publishers of future license holders to understand the market.
When they try to "shift risks" backwards to the dev. they just loose 2 times, before release and when the game turns out to be a flop...
As they are hesitant to take them they often endanger the whole project to the point of failure.
Publishing needs more commitment and to evolve from a stage where it is blockading it's own progress.
Yeah, rushing a game out of the beta stages and into launch can be bad, but so can keeping it in beta FOREVER (hinthint: Dragonica, I'm looking at you)
The longer you keep a game in beta, the more people on the forums waiting patiently and giving out good ideas just get tired of a game that has no new info, and leaves. They might come back, or tey might forget about the game completely until years after launch, and by then who knows? The game could have gone under anyway.
It also has to do with certain people in the beta. You know the type, the ones that complain about EVERYTHING even if it's minor and chances are nobody will see it. There are always that group of people that do nothing but complain about the game in its state and refuse to look at the good parts. Usually small in number, but they whine CONSTANTLY, which makes people think there are a lot of them.