Public beta releases
It seems to me that a lot of Developers/Publishers are releasing beta's of their games before the demo to the public. For Publishers like EA this seems very strange as most of the games they release are buggy as hell anyway and that is after private beta and demo release.
It would seem as though certain companies are either trying to improve their new games to remove as many bugs as possible by doing a public beta or saving money by skipping private beta testing.
Who has been the biggest winner?
Probably FilePlanet. They were offering beta keys to subscribers for Crysis. If you don't know what Crysis is you have probably been living under a rock on the Isle of Man for the past 2 years or so. The beta keys were only available to FilePlanet subscribers which meant you had to pay a subscription fee. A lot of people signed up to FilePlanet purely to get their hands on the beta of Crysis. Crysis has been so overhyped gamers are willing to pay for a beta release of a game. I am sure these will be the same people that complain in a months time that the game costs too much.
Is it so hard to wait 2 months for the whole game to come out? Or even 1 month for the demo which is out on the 26th October, 2 days from now. The demo was supposed to be out last month but was held back a month, I assume this was because EA can pile more shit, I mean a working beta of the game on to users machines while getting a tidy sum from FilePlanet I am sure.
There was also a mysterious release of Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3). With all due respect you either release a beta or a demo. What the fuck is a beta demo supposed to be? Is it a demo that isn't quite ready to be released? Or is beta supposed to make it seem more exclusive, although under the name it is just a demo. Eitherway UT3 was extremely impressive, it held on to Unreal Tournament 2004 perfectly and has increased the graphics alot.
For those that don't know; UT3 was released with medium quality textures. Texture levels 3,4 and 5 are all the same. I found it oddly amusing that gamers were ecstatic about playing this new super game on max settings as smooth as medium settings.
The third game that I have seen released lately in a public beta was BlackSite: Area 51. This game hasn't had as much press, mainly because of Halo 3, Orange Box, Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 and the fact that after playing it for around 20 mins found out it is just another bog standard first person shooter. Unfortunately I have only had the mispleasure of playing the game on the Xbox 360 as I am sure it will get more advertising through the console market than the PC market.
