Thread: What does "beta" mean?

I hear sometimes that a game is in beta, or that it is a beta, or something like that....what does that mean? anyone know?

thanks.

It means it is in the second (or beta) phase.

The original is being updated for improvement, and this is known as beta.

A little more than a demo with kinks to be ironed out and features omitted and to be expanded.

Alpha - Early development; unplayable.
Beta - Nearly complete but too buggy to be released. Usually a group of random people are selected to playtest and report bugs to get the kinks out and see if the game mechanics are broken or not.
Gold - Ready to go to press and sold. For PC, PS3, and XBox, can be patched if more bugs are found. Other consoles usually wait longer since the came needs to be perfect.

It's all about breaking (and fixing) the game before it goes gold and hits the presses.

Alpha is normally in-house testing by members of the team - you try to break it yourselves.

Closed Beta is when you selectively invite useful outsiders to try to break it for you, after you have done the alpha testing. Because they haven't already done all the alpha work since the game was started, they find all sorts of things the designers didn't think to try because "it wasn't designed that way."

Open Beta is normally used for stress testing and other reliability issues, once the alpha and closed beta have gotten a decent number of the individual bugs. Then you open the doors and see what happens under fire.

Normally? It goes "boom." But then you have nifty data rubble to sort through so you can try to fix said issues.

~G

i beta tested everquest online adventures for ps2

I'm beta testing a Coors Light right now.

B in the greek alphabet.

I am beta testing Quake Live. I have also beta tested Dungeons and Dragons Online, Dungeon Runners, and Tabula Rasa.

I was in the first hundred for beta-testing Star Wars Galaxies. I was on those boards for 3 years. I spent more time there than I have here by far. And in the end, when they weren't listening to us in beta and they'd already drawn their line in the sand, it became horribly frustrating. Because most of us in the closed beta knew it wasn't ready, knew exactly what wasn't going to work, but they'd gone feature-complete and just wanted us to debug the game. Whether it was fun or not, or what it was supposed to be per their previous conversations with us or not, was immaterial. And they wasted some of the finest graphics work ever done on a game with bad game mechanics and a need to make back the budget sooner rather than later.

I didn't play that game more than maybe a month or two after release (which was about 9 months after I started in closed beta). They bought off some of us with jobs, like Thunderheart who became a community mod and mouthpiece. But Blade, and Bajeezus, and a bunch of us were not happy. AFAIK they kept playing, but when a company knows it's doing something wrong and continues to do it because it's more convenient, the game goes in the crapper. SWG should have been WoW-level in terms of popularity, but with better game design. It should have been as amazing as the art and world design. But they screwed it up, and wouldn't let us help. It was a shame, because that's still the finest gaming community I have ever seen.

I've been in a number of betas since (City of Heroes, WoW, Conan, etc) but I can't muster up the same enthusiasm for it that I had with SWG.

It's a lot of your life to pour into somebody else's project, especially when there's no reward of making the game better at the end of your effort.

Beta testing can be a tough lot, if you do it the way you should. Most people just sign up for a chance to play the game early and then complain about the server errors and lag times. But to anybody who actually beta-tests, and breaks things on purpose with complete documentation of said break, time and time again, congrats. It ain't always easy, but hopefully for your games it's rewarding.

~G

Originally Posted by G_Money

I was in the first hundred for beta-testing Star Wars Galaxies. I was on those boards for 3 years. I spent more time there than I have here by far. And in the end, when they weren't listening to us in beta and they'd already drawn their line in the sand, it became horribly frustrating. Because most of us in the closed beta knew it wasn't ready, knew exactly what wasn't going to work, but they'd gone feature-complete and just wanted us to debug the game. Whether it was fun or not, or what it was supposed to be per their previous conversations with us or not, was immaterial. And they wasted some of the finest graphics work ever done on a game with bad game mechanics and a need to make back the budget sooner rather than later.

I didn't play that game more than maybe a month or two after release (which was about 9 months after I started in closed beta). They bought off some of us with jobs, like Thunderheart who became a community mod and mouthpiece. But Blade, and Bajeezus, and a bunch of us were not happy. AFAIK they kept playing, but when a company knows it's doing something wrong and continues to do it because it's more convenient, the game goes in the crapper. SWG should have been WoW-level in terms of popularity, but with better game design. It should have been as amazing as the art and world design. But they screwed it up, and wouldn't let us help. It was a shame, because that's still the finest gaming community I have ever seen.

I've been in a number of betas since (City of Heroes, WoW, Conan, etc) but I can't muster up the same enthusiasm for it that I had with SWG.

It's a lot of your life to pour into somebody else's project, especially when there's no reward of making the game better at the end of your effort.

Beta testing can be a tough lot, if you do it the way you should. Most people just sign up for a chance to play the game early and then complain about the server errors and lag times. But to anybody who actually beta-tests, and breaks things on purpose with complete documentation of said break, time and time again, congrats. It ain't always easy, but hopefully for your games it's rewarding.

~G

That was how I did it when I had the time. Now I don't sign up for closed betas anymore since I know I can't put in that kind of time. The quake live beta was just something that I had forgotten I had signed up for. Right now its unplayable since they invited too many people to play and don't have the servers to handle the load.