Too Many Beta Testers Hurt Tabula Rasa
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Gamasutra offers some insight from Richard Garriott during the 2007 Independent Game Conference. Richard was asked about the marketing of Tabula Rasa. While he feels the marketing was “fine,” he points out the real problem was himself and the development team by saying what hurt the game was the invitation of too many beta testers before the game was fun enough to be worth playing.
“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.â€
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.â€
Tags: beta, mmo, richard garriott, tabula rasa
