Haha, love your sig, first of all.
AI 1 = Chris.
AI 2 = Keith.
Taken from Bognor
Regarding the alpha/beta, it varies a bit from game to game honestly.
With TLF we pulled a handful of people we knew the best to take a look at it before anyone else, and we'll definitely be doing the same here. That helps clean up some of the most obvious stuff that we otherwise don't see. With TLF we then did an invite-only beta where everyone who was a part of it got the game for free. That worked well for that game, because it was still evolving in the combat area in particular, and we were really trying to capture first impressions and be assured of getting waves of feedback.
With Valley 1 and 2, and with all but the last 2 AI War expansions, we put them on sale in their beta state, and people could buy into those at any time at a discount and also get the full game when it came out (of course).
And we've done some mix of those approaches for the other games.
For SBR... I have not fully decided yet, except that I know we'll be inviting a select few folks in January to be alpha testers to give us feedback before we invite in a wider audience. With SBR, a LOT more of my own time is reserved for personal testing of the game and then tuning based on my own observations rather than just those given by other people. That was something that was key to AI War really being what it was, we believe. Additionally, we'll be running what is for us a very length "true beta" (where things of importance are feature-complete and not flip-flopping around design-wise), of around 3 months. In the past we did that for a month with Bionic Dues, and it served that game very well, but that was a much smaller game.
My thoughts based on all that is that probably we'll wind up doing a "free demo of the beta at any time, or buy to get the full beta and the finished product" process starting in February. Most likely just through our site, because doing that on other stores at the same time can really dilute the effectiveness of the actual launch.
None of that is set in stone yet, but that's where my head is at right now, anyway.