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.”