Do you want some marketing with your open beta?

by Seraphina Brennan May 8th 2008 at 1:30PM

Filed under: Betas, Fantasy, Age of Conan, Business models, MMO industry, Opinion

Many more developers are answering that question with a enthusiastic, "Yes, moar marketing plz." Why shouldn't they, when a open beta is a great way to let people get a hands on with your game before it comes out. If your open beta is in fairly solid shape for most people's systems, the good word-of-mouth will pay off. That pre-launch buzz is going to net you more sales, and isn't that what you want in the long run?

But this whole controversy isn't getting started up because no one realized that open beta could also be spun as marketing. No, this controversy is being started up because many of Funcom's actions regarding the Age of Conan open beta were blatant marketing strategies. Yet, all of us were scratching our heads when a bomb finally dropped -- the open beta used a prior version of the AoC client?

So what gives? Why did Funcom choose a buggier version to release to the 50,000 new faces? Not exactly a great way to start a game, and Rick over at /Random agrees. We all know that Age of Conan has the gameplay to be a winner, but you can't see the juicy goodness if you can't run it for longer than 12 seconds.

Rick's theory here is that it all comes down to communication. Giving us a client that was a couple versions behind would be acceptable if we had known about it and were informed that this client was, in fact, worse. Communicating to us a game plan for the open beta and telling us why they chose this particular client would have solved countless issues.

To add to Rick's article, I think another very salient wound would be the fact that it was a FilePlanet subscriber beta. If you wanted guaranteed access, you needed to pay five bucks to IGN to get access to FilePlanet. It was pumped up, it was glorified, and it was elevated above all other games and open betas. To give paying customers (yes five bucks is a paying customer) anything less than the best client was a disastrous mistake.

I'll throw another argument in here -- why not just run it like every other open beta? Keep it mildly downplayed, let testers come in and do their jobs with the stress test, and then begin to fire the marketing cannons afterwards? Once again, another great way to avoid getting egg on your face and simultaneously avoid re-inventing the marketing wheel.

At the end of the day, a lot of people say that any press is good press. However, in the world of game design, I respectfully disagree.

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, funcom, marketing, mmo-industry, open-beta

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Green Armadillo said on 2:11PM 5-08-2008

I think this is an issue with the game's PUBLISHERS, not the DEVELOPER. The Developers hate having their testing exercise get over-run by more people than they could listen to if they wanted to. Now sure, they want the game to succeed too, but their job is to make a good game first and foremost, and tens of thousands of non-testers isn't the way to get that job done. It's the publisher (or the publishing side of the company, if they have both in house) that's concerned with marketing, with only the slightest testing benefit (i.e. stress testing) to the actual developers.

Mark said on 2:20PM 5-08-2008

It's Funcoms obligation as a business to generate as much revenue as possible - you can't knock them for the Open Beta agreement. The demand for the open beta was enourmous and they only had limited number of spots available. What is a better solution? By going with FilePlanet, Funcom was able to generate some cash, save some cash (by not having to pay for bandwidth to distribute the client themselves), and curbed demand.

Scopique said on 2:49PM 5-08-2008

I agree with Mark. I'd also like to add this: by releasing an older client, wouldn't that make the actual RELEASE client look so much better?

Considering that Funcom basically defined the concept of "Bad Launch" with AO back in the day, by performing this "bait and switch" it makes them look like they've worked their asses off in the 11th hour to "fix" all the issues that the beta client had.

All me a conspiracy theorist, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a polished client that no one has seen.

Rick said on 3:08PM 5-08-2008

I'd give the conspiracy theory some credence if Funcom hadn't gone and admitted that the open beta code was fubared because they threw in some last minute changes in the hours before the open beta started, and actually delayed the open beta to get those changes shoved into the client.

I think assuming that they released something buggy just to look good in another two weeks, when they release polished final game code, is giving them too much credit. Especially if the buggy open beta code contributes to people not buying the game at launch. We all know that a good launch goes a long way toward overall success of a game. It's the rare mmo that gets a slow start and then picks up steam. It's even more rare for fantasy-themed mmo's.

GRT said on 3:32PM 5-08-2008

I thought we'd squashed this "old client" rumor already?

"And yes, I have seen the same rumors that it’s old, but it’s not entirely true. We tried to include the best we had on a stable approach, but in our eagerness to please we wanted to get a few additional fixes out (hence we pushed the launch back a couple of hours). In order to reach the May 1st date some of those fixes led to unwanted side-effects which weren’t discovered in time."
- Funcom’s Age of Conan Product Director Jorgen Tharaldsen

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?GAME=191&FEATURE=1927&bhcp=1