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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Fileplanet
Dec 5, 2007, 15:54
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Fileplanet Dec 5, 2007, 15:54
Dec 5, 2007, 15:54
 
This is the problem when you have subscriber exclusive 'betas'. Its not a tool for testing, its simply a perk people get and something that gamespy use to drive traffic and subscriptions.

Go back to the old model of restricted technical beta's with largely complete games and have a free week event as the final stress test before the game goes live. You get the old beta usefulness back, and you get the marketing of the polished game too.

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  Fileplanet
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