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Am I jumping the gun by feeling that my intelligence is being insulted by this concept?

Oh, yeah, sure. Let me line right up to give you money so I can QA your games for you. Sounds like a good deal.

Am I missing something? Or is this the most insulting thing ever?

On the other hand, they can just release the game without any testing whatsoever. Then it would be a horrible buggy, unbalanced game you would have to pay full price for.
This way, the developers can get good feedback, stress test servers and check for bugs which otherwise wouldn't be caught.

Yes, they used to actually pay people to do this. There were entire QA companies out there that did this. Now I guess we are to pay for the privilege.

Devs - Hey guys, we have an idea
Consumer - I like that idea
Devs - You can buy into now if you want to, and help us make it better when it releases if you want.
Consumer - I support this endeavor, and I plan to buy the game, why not make it as good as it possibly can be? Sign me up.

And there you have it. They are not making you play the game early, they are allowing you to do so. Are you QA testing? Yeah pretty much, but only because you actually wanted to, that's why you bought the game before it was released.

If you don't like the system, don't buy the game until it releases. Simple.

 Xenocidal Maniac wrote:
Yes, they used to actually pay people to do this. There were entire QA companies out there that did this. Now I guess we are to pay for the privilege.

What you pay for is the chance to help a game that you like. I don't think i've seen a game where you buy early access and don't get the full release when it comes out so you're also just buying the game...
Actually. Just read Necroshea's post...

 Xenocidal Maniac wrote:
Am I jumping the gun by feeling that my intelligence is being insulted by this concept?

Oh, yeah, sure. Let me line right up to give you money so I can QA your games for you. Sounds like a good deal.

Am I missing something? Or is this the most insulting thing ever?

Get the game early, help guide its development, reduce QA costs so they can spend more time on the game? what again is the downside?

The added benefit is that since you're not an employee, but are rather a customer you can bitch up a storm and if enough people bitch, gak gets fixed fast, and they can't treat you like dirt (to your face).

If you don't want to beta test, don't buy in to the beta.

I picked up the state of decay early release...

I would say its great, you get to have a part in developing the game, you get it cheaper then the final version, and you still get the final version in the end.

if you dont like it, you dont have to do it, but I certainly have had good experiences with it.

Although i have nothing really against Early Access. I do think it's funny that the Naive viewpoint displayed here is so widespread. It's perfectly reasonable to say it's greedy.

The open/paid Betas and Alphas are never released to be a source of valuable QA data, this is a secondary (usually minor) benefit, even side effect. Open Betas and Alphas are released, and monetised, as a source of marketing and revenue. This 'help develop the game BS is a sucker's line. EDIT: Certain Multiplayer only projects may skew this massive imbalance a little.

Even Minecraft was released in Alpha to make dat moola.

I could go even further and fairly safely say say that the only useful QA data taken from say the battlefield 3 or 4 beta (and any other big game) is likely server loads and major hardware issues(which often go unresolved). Heat maps, weapon balance and spawn locations are determined by professional QA testers earlier in production. Admittedly said QA testers may be involved in the Public betas themselves but developers could not care less what you think about these things. Even stuff like Optimisation of Graphics cards and driver support is determined post-release, any fixes done during the beta are only temporary due to the fact they are attached to an obsolete build.

If that's true then devs need to pay more attention to the betas...
Some games have absolutely horrifying spawn systems...

You should have played Killzone 2 lol. It wasn't a good game until you had the other team completely locked in their base

I think double fine were pretty laudably honest about their upcoming early access for 'Broken Age'. Words to the effect of 'Look guys, we've run out of money, can you help us out through the early access program?'.

 Perkustin wrote:
you had the other team completely locked in their base

I think you're confusing "good" with "complete and utter crap".

 Perkustin wrote:
Although i have nothing really against Early Access. I do think it's funny that the Naive viewpoint displayed here is so widespread. It's perfectly reasonable to say it's greedy.

The open/paid Betas and Alphas are never released to be a source of valuable QA data, this is a secondary (usually minor) benefit, even side effect. Open Betas and Alphas are released, and monetised, as a source of marketing and revenue. This 'help develop the game BS is a sucker's line. EDIT: Certain Multiplayer only projects may skew this massive imbalance a little.

Even Minecraft was released in Alpha to make dat moola.

I could go even further and fairly safely say say that the only useful QA data taken from say the battlefield 3 or 4 beta (and any other big game) is likely server loads and major hardware issues(which often go unresolved). Heat maps, weapon balance and spawn locations are determined by professional QA testers earlier in production. Admittedly said QA testers may be involved in the Public betas themselves but developers could not care less what you think about these things. Even stuff like Optimisation of Graphics cards and driver support is determined post-release, any fixes done during the beta are only temporary due to the fact they are attached to an obsolete build.

I would agree with the above in a general (but not always). I've only been in three "betas" in my life (all on the xbox 360) and one of them would be hard pressed to justify why they were actually a beta. The worst was "Defiance" that occured two weeks before the game hit the shelves and way too late to actually affect anything since it had already gone gold. I'm sure someone will say that they could just patch the problems found but that apparently didn't happen either according to a friend that bought the game (I didn't due to the unpleasant gameplay I encountered). That beta would have been best characterized as a "limited release weekend demo" as it lasted all of one weekend. On the other hand, I'm in the World of Tanks Xbox Beta and it's been going on for almost two months and the game has received major revisions during that time both to the in-game and menu user interface and to the game play. Audio and visual elements have changed, tanks have been frequently tweaked for balance, glitches fixed, etc. They've done a really good job from a playtester perspective with WOT. Halo 3 felt somewhere in the middle but that could be because it was significantly more polished to start but they did allow significant time for the beta feedback to actually be incorporated/fixed in the retail game.

 warboss wrote:

 Perkustin wrote:
Although i have nothing really against Early Access. I do think it's funny that the Naive viewpoint displayed here is so widespread. It's perfectly reasonable to say it's greedy.

The open/paid Betas and Alphas are never released to be a source of valuable QA data, this is a secondary (usually minor) benefit, even side effect. Open Betas and Alphas are released, and monetised, as a source of marketing and revenue. This 'help develop the game BS is a sucker's line. EDIT: Certain Multiplayer only projects may skew this massive imbalance a little.

Even Minecraft was released in Alpha to make dat moola.

I could go even further and fairly safely say say that the only useful QA data taken from say the battlefield 3 or 4 beta (and any other big game) is likely server loads and major hardware issues(which often go unresolved). Heat maps, weapon balance and spawn locations are determined by professional QA testers earlier in production. Admittedly said QA testers may be involved in the Public betas themselves but developers could not care less what you think about these things. Even stuff like Optimisation of Graphics cards and driver support is determined post-release, any fixes done during the beta are only temporary due to the fact they are attached to an obsolete build.

I would agree with the above in a general (but not always). I've only been in three "betas" in my life (all on the xbox 360) and one of them would be hard pressed to justify why they were actually a beta. The worst was "Defiance" that occured two weeks before the game hit the shelves and way too late to actually affect anything since it had already gone gold. I'm sure someone will say that they could just patch the problems found but that apparently didn't happen either according to a friend that bought the game (I didn't due to the unpleasant gameplay I encountered). That beta would have been best characterized as a "limited release weekend demo" as it lasted all of one weekend. On the other hand, I'm in the World of Tanks Xbox Beta and it's been going on for almost two months and the game has received major revisions during that time both to the in-game and menu user interface and to the game play. Audio and visual elements have changed, tanks have been frequently tweaked for balance, glitches fixed, etc. They've done a really good job from a playtester perspective with WOT. Halo 3 felt somewhere in the middle but that could be because it was significantly more polished to start but they did allow significant time for the beta feedback to actually be incorporated/fixed in the retail game.

The only problem is that all these new really extensive betas like DOTA 2 or World of Tanks 360 are for free to play games. To me it makes sense financially to release a f2p game as soon as you have a product that is not going to give an overpoweringly negative impression. Just like those 'Multiplayer Demos' for BF3 and now 4, they are marketing tools.

It's free publicity and due to the deferred ROI inherent in the F2P model it's not complete suicide, infact it's a way to work out what you should make your money from. A major goal of the recent Neverwinter MMOG Beta was exactly that; to work out what players were willing to pay for. You even get games like Dota 2 having micro transactions implemented very early in the process, in that case Valve decided early on that cosmetic upgrades were the best revenue stream. Infact you could say the Hats in TF2 were a ROI beta test for Dota 2

I am glad you mention the Halo 3 beta as i believe Bungie went into that with honest intentions and i believe they got useful data from it, same for Reach. However, certainly for 3, Bungie stated that the community did not engage with the feedback tools they had provided them with and were slightly disappointed with the lack of useful community feedback. For Reach they relied instead on raw statistics taken from the servers iirc.

OP here.

Yeah, I know this is kind of a whine, and perhaps I am getting my panties in a bunch over nothing. Businesses have every right to try to maximize profit in whatever ways they see fit providing they don't harm anyone or break any laws. I can see that this "early release" thing is one of those attempts.

However, as consumers, the only way we prevent this from becoming the norm is to put our collective feet down now. All I am saying is I remember back when game companies would practically pay the players to beta test their games, not the other way around. I don't like the precedent it sets.

But, then again, I'm the type of guy who has never worked an internship in his life because I don't work for free. And I am certainly not going to pay game companies to do their work for them.

 Xenocidal Maniac wrote:

However, as consumers, the only way we prevent this from becoming the norm is to put our collective feet down now. All I am saying is I remember back when game companies would practically pay the players to beta test their games, not the other way around. I don't like the precedent it sets.

And when exactly was this magical time?

Right now you see "beta"(read: early testing build access) access as part of preorders or things like that. You're not actually paying the company to test the game. You're paying for your game and getting something to play with before.
Back when you saw a lot more visible closed beta testing, you would end up with companies actually physically mailing you a CD/DVD with the game files and an activation code. That's no longer a necessity now when you can actually be a lot more proactive and allow digital downloads...which incidentally make it slightly easier to control access to the files themselves and shut out leaks.