The Quest for Online Betas : An Impassioned Plea

First Castle Crashers. Then Gears of War 2. And now Battlefield 1943.

The time to demand betas is upon us, my gamer friends. As consumers of digital entertainment, we have a right to demand quality for every product we purchase with our hard-earned dollars. Lately it seems as though the exchange has been very one-sided - we gamers plop down our cash and then sit and wait until all the "unexpected issues" are worked out on the developers side.

And we wait. And wait. And wait.

In the case of Castle Crashers, we waited nearly 4 months so that we could play the game without lag over Xbox Live, or without the fear of our game progress being magically wiped out - or getting booted out of online matches - for no good reason other than the game felt like it.

With Gears 2, we're still waiting for smooth matchmaking and consistently lag-free multiplayer... 8 months and 4 "title updates" later. 

Which leads us to Battlefield 1943 - a game that was highly anticipated and released into the wild to mass fanfare on July 8th on Xbox Live (it hit PSN the next day).  Problem is - most people on Xbox Live can't play it. Many of those who DON'T get the "Cannot connect to EA online" when trying to sign in seems to be bogged down with awful matchmaking, intolerable lag, and an overall miserable experience.  The PSN version seems to be running fairly smoothly - unfortunately, Xbox Live is where most gamers do their multi-platform online gaming, and that's where most of my friends have been trying to get their BF1943 game on.

DICE/EA have pinned this problem on "server utiilization".  While I have no idea what the actual problem will end up being (I haven't heard any Xbox Live infrastructure conspiracy theories yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time), the fact that there are any problems at all is a problem. 

So how do we solve this problem? I see one of two ways: betas or refunds.

We'll disregard refunds right now, as the industry and retailers will never, ever voluntarily offer up refunds, even for broken, defective products like Battlefield 1943. It would take some government intervention in the form of a Gamers Bill of Rights to actually make refunds a reality.

Which leads us to betas.  The Almighty CliffyB's absolutely asinine opinion of demos aside, betas/demos are an absolute no-brainer. They are a win-win situation for gamers and developers alike: developers get to hock their warez and test out their code/infrastructure settings for optimization, and gamers get a sneak peek at a game they're interested in. All major showstoppers get worked out before the game is humiliatingly released to the general public. So why don't developers consistently follow this strategy?

The argument that a gamer will only play a demo and not buy it is bullshit - corporate speak for "we will sell you this game, and you will buy it because of the hype-machine, and you will never know that it doesn't completely work until it's too late to do anything about it!".  If a game is worthwhile - in other words, if the game is GOOD - we will purchase it. Really, I promise. The only sales you'll lose is if your game sucks or is severely broken - which puts Cliffy B's comments into perspective.

Remember, Doom 1's entire first episode was shareware - gamers had to purchase the remaining 2 episodes to finish the game - and last I saw id wasn't doing too bad for itself.

If a developer isn't comfortable with an outright public beta from the start, they can do a closed beta and slowly ramp up its user base until its time to open it to the masses.  Ironically, EA did this with Battlefield Heroes (PC), and while the public beta had sporadic issues, it was a hell of a lot smoother than BF1943's production release. World at War had a closed beta for its online pre-release, and Uncharted 2 is currently undergoing its own online beta well in advance of its release - so it's not as if this idea is foreign to developers and publishers.

And before the developer sympathizers jump on my case - no, I'm not asking for perfection for every game I play. We put up with patches all the time, and have since developers realized they could release potentially buggy code on the masses, hope noone notices, and then push out a patch. But what we SHOULD demand is a working product - a product that we can use, as it is advertised, on Day One.

By demanding anything less, not only are the developers screwing us, but we would be screwing ourselves as well.