Tabula Rasa: Too Many Testers

Gamasutra offers some reflections from Richard (Lord/General British) Garriott at the 2007 Independent Game Conference after the Destination Games/NCsoft designer was asked about the marketing of Tabula Rasa. While he feels the marketing (which he describes as a "black art") was "fine," he reserves some criticism for himself and the development team, saying something that hurt the game was the invitation of too many beta testers before the game was fun enough to be worth playing. Garriott commends the Guild Wars team for how well they handled their own testing, but has this to say about testing Tabula Rasa:
“We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn’t yet fun," he said, adding, "As we’ve begun to sell the game, the people who hadn’t participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters.”

He continued, “And the people who did participate in the beta, we’ve had to go back to and say ‘look, look, we promise: we know it wasn’t fun two months ago, but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.’ We’ve had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process.”
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About Garriot....
Dec 5, 2007, 13:12
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About Garriot.... Dec 5, 2007, 13:12
Dec 5, 2007, 13:12
 
Garriot seems to have little or no actual interest in making a good game. He's long past that. It seems he just wants to create a marketable product. I remember him bragging about how profitable Ultima Online was when the game was literally unplayable. He didn't care about game quality or the people playing his game then, and I doubt he cares now.

This comment was edited on Dec 5, 13:12.
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About Garriot....
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