‘Beta’ a new marketing strategy

Not so long ago the term ‘beta’ was a pure description applied to video games to indicate their unfinished status.
A beta stage indicated that a game’s development was nearing completion, but bugs and glitches needed to be worked out before it was released for sale.
But nowadays it’s not uncommon for gamers to find the term attached to almost any major title, and then marketed as an early chance for gamers to try before they buy.
The term beta has now changed by definition, and is no longer an exclusive build of a game confined to game testers or a small portion of the gaming community.
A beta is now a new-age marketing tag that often tricks gamers into believing they are playing something exclusive, and providing feedback to developers.
The latter action they may well be doing, but the overwhelming feeling is that of a focus group, with developers straying away from bug-finding to even ask players what they want in their game. The ice-breaker was undoubtedly the Halo 3 Public Beta in May.
Having played the game, E-Talk believes that even in its so-called beta stage, the early build of the much-hyped first-person shooter was the best online game on the Xbox 360.
Bungie, its developer, could have released Halo 3’s multiplayer element that week and sold millions of copies worldwide.
So while it’s promising to see the developer take on board suggestions from the people they want to enjoy, and hence buy, the game, clearly calling it a beta test is misleading.
This week, the Xbox 360 is hosting another beta for a first-person shooter, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
The game is scheduled for an early November launch – clearly not enough time to make sweeping changes to the game code.
So what is the true purpose of the beta? Again, E-Talk believes that while it is fun, the beta is not so much a platform for testing the game and providing feedback but rather an early demo pitched at selling the product to gamers. This is not to say that playing betas is a bad thing.
More often than not they are free, and will save gamers the pain of having to purchase the final product to see whether or not they like it.
One genre that genuinely benefits from public beta testing is massively multiplayer online (MMO).
Games in this genre include World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.
Each had a beta-testing calendar that included closed betas, stress tests and open betas.
Developers in the MMO genre rely on the feedback of players, given the sandbox nature of online game worlds. Given MMOs are largely made for PCs, a beta also allows gamers to sample the title and see how well it performs on their hardware.