So my roommate and I spent the other weekend playing the open beta test for Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands (which is totally fun and you missed out if you didn’t try it). Now, I will admit that I love gaming, video games and all that comes with it, hence why I sometimes subject myself to some early access. That being said, this is not my first rodeo with a beta test, and to be honest, open beta tests are more like glorified demos of soon-to-be-released games. Their basic purpose is to hype the general population with but a small taste of something that is 99.99 percent complete.

Of course, there will still be bugs even this late in the development stage, and many in the industry see this as a way to find those final kinks with a massive public search (I personally ran into two instances where my game just crashed for no reason whatsoever due to a runtime error in an isolated location). Even so, most people do not use open betas for that purpose. Most use it as a way to see if the product is worth buying, or in some cases, get ahead of the competition. There is however one stipulation about all this though folks that participate in these kinds of tests, most don’t get compensated for their work.

Early access, closed alpha tests, closed beta tests and open beta tests are essentially a way companies can get a free way to tests their games and debug them. Some early access games, mostly found on digital distribution platforms like Steam or Origin, even require a small fee from the would-be tester with the compensation being that they get the game for free when it comes out (even though they spent money to “test” said game). This model of testing does have its problems on both sides that anyone with half a brain can see. The easier one to see is from the players side, imagine paying for something with the promise that will be completed at a later date. Promises can be broken, and there are many instances where a small-time developer will hype several products simultaneously and watch as the masses gobble it up.

Then, after releasing a sprinkling of content here and there--poof! They’re gone with your money in tow. If you don’t believe me, go look at some early access stuff on Steam and read some of the negative reviews. So you may be asking what problems do developers face from this kind of testing? Simple: it’s the lack of professionalism amongst the general populous. Most people invited to closed testing whether alpha or beta aren’t professional game testers but are content creators and internet personalities. Their purpose is more for hype purposes as finding bugs takes a close back seat to the game as I’ve yet to see an alpha or beta tester publish content that showed the bugs the game dealt with and why is that.

Simply put, it’s bad for publicity and the overall objective of hyping the game. For the smaller guys, it’s worse as they are pressured to release new content for people to test in a timely manner or face the wrath of a mass of bad reviews due to “negligence." So, is public game testing viable? Yes and no, because while you may have companies using them to generate a lot of hype, there are many content creators that do actually what the final product to not be bugged to hell and back so many will actually do their due diligence to find the issues and report them. I mean, I know I did and I don’t even stream new stuff. On that note, if anyone wants to know where I'll be Monday night Tuesday morning on the 7th of March, I'll be at my place playing Wildlands.