Just a clarification -- we've noted this in other threads, but apparently not in this one. We're not going to be running a public beta for this game, unlike our other games. We WILL be running a second round of private alpha this week, so you can PM Josh (tigersfan) if you want to get in on that. Alternatively, of course, the full game is launch to 1.0 on May 23rd, a mere 10 days from now.
Why no public beta? Well, several reasons, really, including but not limited to:
1. The pool of quality testers that we need we pretty well already have, in terms of the first round of things. We're going to run a second round of alpha to re-test our "first impressions" on people with the revised tutorial and all that, but beyond that we have plenty of people poking holes in things that need holes poked in them, and in general giving us all the feedback we need. In other words, from a practical standpoint we don't need to do a public beta.
2. Doing a public beta can be time-consuming especially when the timeframe is short. We have to get all the store stuff set up early, and all that stuff with the typical beta distributors for the game, when that time could be better spent working on polish to the game and getting 100% feature-complete, first. I'd rather work on the store stuff after we get further in. This point is really kind of a project management argument, in terms of what happens first in order to make it to the end of a project in the best state in the fastest time.
3. From a marketing standpoint, this is much to our advantage, since #1 above isn't an issue. The press are way more interested in talking about stuff that has not yet come out, in terms of being available to the public at all in a lot of respects. They also are more likely to do shorter-timeframe reviews if the game isn't out even in a beta format yet, which again benefits us. Remember that NOT doing a public beta is actually the norm in the industry, so Arcen has always been an oddity in how we do things there. I think that sometimes hurts us with the press in terms of when they do reviews or coverage (not that we hurt for coverage compared to many indies, but we always want more more more like everyone does).
4. In many respects I love being that oddity as described in #3, but we have to also gauge these things on a project-by-project basis. Will AI War's next expansion have a public beta? Most definitely. Will expansions to Skyward Collapse, if there are any, have them? I would be hugely surprised if not. Will new games in the future have them? Eh... more often than not, probably not. But again that will vary by project to project, so some surely will if they need a long testing cycle for whatever reason.
5. With players as well, not doing a public beta has many benefits. Silly as this sounds, the power of anticipation is actually something that we are realizing is really important. I don't mind telling you this, because of course this applies to me as well when looking at games by other developers as well. The power of "I want that thing but can't yet have it" is one of the major driving forces of launch sales. Launch sales are one of the main driving forces of word of mouth, which is the main driving force behind a long-term success story for a game.
6. Pulling together #3 and #6: We really botched things with Valley 2 and Shattered Haven by thinking that we'd do a public beta with players, but being most quiet with the press in the runup to launch. The result was that players who were in the beta, and thus were most vocally excited about the games, were already dozens of hours into the games by the time launch came around. Their excitement had been replaced with long familiarity -- and hopefully still very positive feelings, but still; long familiarity leads people to be a lot less evangelical and just assume the game is going to be a success. On the press side we hoped that the "look at this awesome thing that came out of nowhere" effect would be a good thing. But there again, the power of anticipation was lost, apparently, and that wound up biting us big-time.
7. #6 sounds pretty manipulative even to me, but bear in mind that's the result of our attempts at analysis of why certain products of ours have fared poorly in terms of launch sales versus others. There are major factors all over the place, but we have tons of data on this stuff, and based on that data it seems that the PR side of things has an extremely major effect. The thing is, what we're describing as our process (the one that sounds "manipulative" to me), is actually just the standard process that everyone uses. All the big companies and most successful indies, anyhow. For a couple of games there we tried a different approach and paid dearly for it. So we went back, looked at the data that was available to us, and tried to figure out why that happened.
8. Continuing #7, I don't think that anyone is trying to intentionally manipulate the excitement of press or players. Or, well, not unjustly. When you stoke excitement for something that actually sucks, you pay for that pretty hard in terms of the hit to your reputation. Not a good idea. But trying to get people excited about something that is actually good is just the standard fare for... well, any industry that sells something, really. I forget where the quote originated, but I always liked it: "Why is a bubble round? Because it's the most energy-efficient configuration." I think that the typical release cycle for games follows that same line of reasoning: there are a lot of games competing for players' attention, and excitement is needed in order for some to rise above the rest. When you do things that actively undermine the excitement about your own stuff, you're kind of popping the bubble (to really push that metaphor well beyond its limit).
9. None of this changes Arcen's commitment do doing things in a manner that we feel is more morally upright than average than companies do, and we still go out of our way to support the consumer. This game will have a demo, returning to our pattern of doing that, and we've even figured out a way that it can have automatic updates like AI War and so forth do for the demo. However, at the same time, we'll have no DRM or license keys, like Shattered Haven managed to do. With Shattered Haven we had no license key but no demo, because we didn't think we could do our normal style of demo without a license key. But since then we've figured it out. We're also launching this game at a lower price to reflect our lower internal development costs thanks to past engine development work saving us a bunch of costs. And so on. We'll do everything we can to make sure that players can basically do a test-drive to find out of their pre-release excitement is justified before they actually make a purchase. Our goal here isn't deception, but is to avoid pushing ourselves into obscurity, if that makes sense.
Anyhow, as noted, we're going to be running another round of alpha coming up in the next day or two -- the reason for the wait and uncertainty is that we want to have it really clean for first impressions for this next batch of players. And if you want to be a part of that, just shoot Josh (tigersfan) a PM and he'll hook you up.
Cheers!
