I was just thinking about this recently and i totally agree. Open beta's are partly why so many games are turning into COD clones. Rather than innovating and making there own game, developers are listening to people who are only used to playing fast paced twitch shooters.

we get to much of any given game before its released, for gods sake before we even beta them there are tons of people playing the game at shows etc.. i know they need feedback to improve the games before they are sold but its getting a ltitle to much, first it was demos now its betas and by the time you get the game the uniqueness and newness has word off.

The thing is these arent actually beta tests. The games he's playing are "public betas" that are more marketing driven. The main purpose of these is to get exposure, not actually find bugs or other issues. At best they stress servers and can help devs with play balance. Actual beta tests are hardly recognized when the retail version hits and for the most part they kind of suck. The purpose of these is to find major bugs during development, not a couple weeks before the game copy goes gold. I've beta tested games dating as far back as the Sega days when they were relevant to gaming. It's anything but fun and always very, very NDA. Today's beta testers want the bragging rights of playing early. That isn't what beta testing is about which is why we have the public beta test that everyone has access to.

-Death

There's still serious private betas, this guy is just talking about the public demos that are for some reason called betas. Those seem to be server stress tests more than anything.

"With Uncharted 2, the transversal gameplay that ND took from its single player campaign was innovative for a multi player shooter; more importantly, it worked."

Which has now been nerfed now you die with a few shots, which stops your urge to climb and do other James bond style awesomeness which made the multi player so great.

:(

Stop complaining, before you know it they will start selling beta's for 10 bucks to anyone to offset developer costs.

You cannot play a beta after the game releases, it doesn't work any longer. This guy says he did. Credability lost, stopped reading, who knows what other kind of non-sense was in there.

I've never played a socom before, i normally only play tps in singleplayer. But from what i saw, it looked good.

The exception was UC2.

I also played in the beta and actually never gave feedback, probably because i really loved the way it was.

I don't have the game anymore, so i don't know how much it has changed. But the Uncharted's of this world were never about mp, SP story is where that game is for me. Mp was a bonus.

As for the article, i do agree with it.90%

You should always cater to your core audience, but to get more people involved, sometimes things have to be changed alittle.

Kratos is rather lame .

Tis guy is missing a big reason for letting everyone in the betas. It gives the developers a chance to see how their game does with big groups of gamers. They can make changes before the game comes out. Being in a beta isn't about being special and part of a small group. It's only for testing the game before release.

Umm instead of complaining, how about erasing those old expired betas/demos? Sounds like a slow news day and the only thing going on is what to complain about next. Congrats on getting me to foolishly contribute to your hit count. Just chock full of win there sheen...

man why do they have to have this picture of Kratos looking so un-happy! it's depressing and ruining my whole day. he looks like he just found out he has a Venereal Disease!

I want to put a caption over Mario's sad picture that says "Dam that stupid princess got captured again"
but substitute Princess for something a little more vulgar.

Best opinion piece I've read in a long time...
I have to agree with the author.
Now a beta just seems to equal a demo.

Dude is completely clueless and doesn't know what a beta is for: it's not created for you to feel "exclusive" or "unique", it's a tool for the developers of the game in order to improve it. This basically mean that you are *volunteering* to participate in an experiment and provide feedback - if you don't like it then simply don't join.

Most public betas anyway are all about load balancing and stress testing - not for vocaling your opinion about "I don't like this, I do like that, this is too much like COD, this is not enough like COD... Public betas come out in a very late phase of the development and at this step you don't change game mechanics.

Tell me again how the multiplatform strategy was supposed to fix everything. Look at your results and compare them to Nintendo, which keeps thriving with exclusives. Your loyal fans are gone. And let’s not forget the pile of IPs you purchased only to let them rot.

The worst thing is this is down from last years numbers/expectations which was down from the previous years numbers/expectations. You think about how long “down” has been a consistent part of the communication and you realize those subscriptions are what’s holding that boat together. The price cut of gamespass is still a price raise in a string of price raises. They are trying to use players to offset the missing revenue. Now call of duty is out of gamespass, which is literally WHY they bought the company. To draw people to the subscription. They realized they missed a boatload of money and that wasn’t sustainable. Now you pay for it like you would have if they never bought the company… so why buy the company? Mind you those billions still need to be paid back. Yeah it gives you a chance to say we make the biggest FPS… but the internal conversations must be brutal at high level on topics that really matter. Like revenue. Profitability. And ROI for the shopping spree.

Is this like the 10th quarter in a row they're down 33% on hardware how is that even mathematically possible. You would think their mediocrity would Plateau