While I’m sure that many of the users on the community haven’t had an online game that went through the alpha/beta stages yet, I’m still curious as to hear your opinion. Many of the games that most of us really want to play and get a feel for seem to be forever stuck in Alpha | Beta stages, only getting criticism from a small audience. Please note that I’m not talking about what they call a “Marketing alpha” here, but a true alpha development scenario.
Users would love to feel like a part of your game and help mold your game into something great, and who’s going to give you better feedback than the people that didn’t come up with the idea. It’s common for the people that play the game to have 1200 ways to improve your game that you haven’t even thought of. It’s also common however for the people that play games to think they know what’s best, when it would actually be game-breaking. However that’s the joy of alpha. You can break something, your community will go “nononononononono” and then you fix it. That’s how it works. It seems rare in this day to seem game development companies (or even indie developers) to listen to the community and try to reach out. There’s nothing that a gamer wants more than to feel like the developers care about them, at-least in my opinion.
I’m on the verge of hosting an open-alpha for my project. Simply because I want to connect with people and see what they think needs to be changed. If your community doesn’t want something, chances are you probably shouldn’t add it into the game.
What do you guys think? What are the pros/cons of holding an open-alpha test for an online game.
If you demo too early, people will get a bad taste in their mouth. You won’t get any good feedback if the presentation is unpolished, the first criticism will always be “graphics suck”. Since most of the time polishing the presentation comes later on, it’s a catch-22. Open testing works at the beta stage because, presumably, that’s technically supposed to be nearly complete… you’re just working out the kinks. Alpha generally means “too crappy to be seen by the general public” in my experience. That’s my take on it.
In the scheme of traditional development lifecycles, alpha is usually not very representative of an end product. Things are typically being cut and added to the game in such a large volume that it’s not beneficial to show people (ignoring focus/play testing). It’s beta, where you lock down your features and focus on fixing your shit, that you can show people without mobs carrying pitchforks because you didn’t deliver X on launch.
Early Access games have left a bit of a bad taste in the mouths of gamers. It’s not due to any one specific reason but rather a number of reasons.
In some cases it was simply a matter of a developer who didn’t release frequent updates or who released updates that were simply terrible and never made any real traction towards a final product. There are even a few games that are dead in the water because the developers didn’t sell enough copies to afford to continue developing.
If I were seriously considering Early Access, I would not consider alpha development. Or at least not an early or mid-point in alpha but rather near the tail end of alpha development. A beta development stage would be far better though. By that point I’d be aware if the game were going to succeed or not.
Additionally I would give those who are willing to buy into the game during alpha development a sizable discount rather than the few dollars off that some developers seem to believe is acceptable. If you’re going to treat your community as QA testers, you should at least give them good incentives to do so.
Minecraft was a good example in my opinion. It started off very early but kept steady updates and a very big discount on price. It mattered far less to me that it was virtually a tech demo because it was practically an impulse buy early on at $5.
Also, most people aren’t game designers by any stretch of the imagination. If you ask people what they want to play, and give them exactly what they say, the game will not be great and they will just blame you (even though it was their ideas that created it) for the shortcomings. Making games is an art form, so it’s like playing music live in front of a crowd and asking them for feedback, to help you finish the song. Eventually I think they’re going to lose interest and then say you’re a terrible musician.
Alphas are a very important part of the development process. Get your core game handled, and where applicable polish some scenes. Just barely enough to give a good impression of gameplay. And then, and only then, you should probably just do a CLOSED alpha. Here’s why:
Most gamers don’t FULLY grasp the concept of alpha. Some do, but the vast majority of your audience is going to see “Alpha” and read “Oh, I can play it now!”. They may say out loud, “This is a test so I should expect bugs”, but then walk away feeling like the game wasn’t complete. Go figure.
Absolutely do an alpha. Hell do several. But be careful about who gets to participate in that alpha. Use friends and family, co-workers, and maybe at the most the next extension of contacts from those people. Maybe get a hundred or so people (if you can pull that number off. Our group is sitting around 30 people right now).
I am going to say that universally, alpha’s should be tested closed only. Betas are going to be different. It depends on what you’re looking for and how much you want to community to participate in your game. But the raw facts are that most people won’t try a game twice. Most. That first impression needs to be solid. Or you need to be dang sure that your test group is actually on the same page with the state of the game. If you start hearing feedback like, “there’s not enough to do” pull the plug.
Only testers and other devs allowed, I think. People who can see the value beyond the things that need work.
I have the problem, that if someone sees what I’m doing, they have nothing good to say. Until I’m like 95% done. Then they suddenly go… oh, I see. That’s not bad.
I write in my spare time and I’ll ask people to read things for me. I’ll tell them it’s a rough draft and to ignore grammar and such, and then the only thing they’ll tell me is that a sentence was weird and I misspelled something. And it’s even worse with games. It’s basically garbage until it’s finished and it’s no longer garbage. And hey, for all intents and purposes, that’s pretty true. But when you’re looking for early actionable feedback it’s a frustrating experience, for sure.
I don’t care what other people want. If they want to make their product look rubbish and release an alpha, so be it. Personally, I am happy polishing and making the best game I can personally so people sit down, enjoy it and go off and do something else.
If you want to connect with gamers, there’s other ways like having a vibrant closed alpha, with passionate followers. If you make it public, you also must be aware of the risks, and so on. It doesn’t need to be all or nothing public if you only want feedback and motivation.
With our latest game, we decided to keep it as a work in progress, and thus it will be in “alpha” state for a very long time. It’s been on Patreon for about two months and starting to bring in some supporters. We listen to what they want and try to incorporate it into the game, but ultimately we have our own vision for it and we do our best to stick to that larger plan.
Before putting it out to the public, though, even though it’s in “alpha” status, it’s more like “alpha special”. We took a very small aspect of whole idea, one that we knew our existing user base (from other games) would latch onto easily, and polished it up to a pretty much finished state before anyone ever got their hands on it. So what we ended up releasing as a supporter-driven “alpha” project was more than enough to wow them with graphics and action, keep their attention, and leave them wanting and asking for more.
The way we did it in the past was to fully polish the game, spend all the time self-funding to get it ready for official release, and then let it into the wild. Going over time on internal deadlines cost a lot of money which ended up having to be recouped on the back-end. Doing it this new way lets us introduce truly alpha concepts while we finish the game, lets the players test things out and give feedback, and helps keep us funded while we do it. So far that seems to be working well.