Blizzard Says ‘Beta’ Has Become A ‘Twisted Word’ And I’m Calling Shenanigans

The Early Access Beta weekend for Diablo IV ended yesterday and unfortunately, Blizzard chose not to extend it by a day despite numerous login and connectivity issues making it basically unplayable for most of Friday—or about a third of the entire beta experience.

Blizzard responded to these issues in an interview at Eurogamer with the game’s general manager, Rod Fergusson. Eurogamer asked: “Did you have a metric for success for this weekend, something in particular that you were looking at? And if you did have one, did you meet it?”

Fergusson’s response [bold sections I’ve highlighted]:

Yeah. Part of it is the number of players. “Beta” has been a twisted word that has become “marketing beta”, which means demo, and for us this was a true beta because we wanted to be able to test that load and what does it mean to get a lot of players in? And Friday was a little bumpy because of that, but the way that we looked at it is the issues we find now are issues that will be a lot smoother at launch. And so this weekend was to prepare for next weekend, and next weekend prepares for launch.

We ended up doing six really big hotfixes that fixed dozens of issues, so we saw server stability come back up and the queues went down, and so we’re feeling really good about that particular aspect.

So we had goals around how many people were going to be playing because we really wanted to test the servers, and so we’ve exceeded the number of players we thought we were going to get.

Now, I’m of two minds on this one. Obviously, a beta exists to test the game at scale similar to what you might encounter at launch, and certainly more than what you can achieve with play-testing. Whether a developer is looking for bugs or performance issues or testing out connectivity under stress with an online game, a beta can help illuminate problems. These can then be fixed and everybody is happier come launch day.

On the other hand, if the word beta has become “twisted’ it’s only because of the game industry—including Activision-Blizzard—using betas as “‘marketing betas” all the time. This includes last weekend’s Early Access Diablo IV beta which was for pre-order customers only (unless you did the KFC deal or found some other promotion). I’m pretty sure that making beta access a pre-order bonus is a type of marketing, creating an incentive for consumers to pick up the game ahead of release. The word beta may indeed mean “demo” now, but that’s by design. That’s the logical outcome of making betas pre-order bonuses or tied to particular perks or platforms.

Sure, it can serve as both a demo and an actual beta—why not?—but it’s silly to say that gamers should only consider it to be the former when they’ve only gotten into it in the first place by paying for the game. Once it becomes a perk you get by paying for something, it’s no longer just a testing beta, it’s an early access demo. That it may be a demo also is beside the point. People have now paid for something and lost a day of that something to connectivity issues and that’s not great.

Fortunately, it sounds like Blizzard has made some major improvements and we’ll see how these carry over to next weekend’s open beta and finally the June 6th launch.

Personally, other than these frustrations I quite liked what I played of Diablo IV and I’m excited to play more next weekend. It’s not perfect but it’s very good and hopefully the team at Blizzard fixes its most glaring issues and shortcomings in the next couple of months.