Here's where your comments fall down .... are you sitting? this may shock you .... game dev companies do still have testers, as in QA or play testers. These people are paid by the game dev company. These people do proper testing, not the faux testing we will (or won't) do in Odyssey's alpha and beta. These people will have signed NDAs and they will get builds of the game months and months before the public see anything.
Lol what an incredibly condescending response to someone who was clearly being sarcastic/facetious. Anyway, let's forge ahead...
What game dev companies do these days, selling access to alpha or beta builds, is NEVER to recruit people to actually test the game for them because they are either too lazy or too incompetent to test a game properly themselves.
For one, saying "NEVER" in big caps doesn't change the fact that you're wrong here, but I will say that you're right that's not
as much being "lazy or incompetent" (even though sometimes it is) as it's... and this might shock you... they're
too cheap. Because guess what? They went from a small independent game dev with budgetary concerns to a publicly-traded corporation with shareholder/profit-margin concerns, almost literally overnight. If you played Elite on release you already know this, it was a bug-filled mess and they took MONTHS to get the game to something resembling "no longer alpha/beta".
They sell access to alpha or beta builds, which again, are only made available to the buying public after A LOT OF TESTING has already been done, to raise additional income. The most famous example is Star Citizen.
It's not for additional income, they're not like Star Citizen at all. It's for the purposes of additional
profit because, as I already stated, they're a publicly-traded company and any marketing move they make is in response to and in service of shareholder interest, not "we need more sales to stay afloat" - that ship sailed the day they went public. And for anyone who has been playing E
for a long time knows, if they're actually releasing what THEY define as ALPHA, you can bet the farm that it will have gone through MINIMIAL testing. Guaranteed.
Now, if you disagree with game dev companies doing this, that's your right to that opinion, and no-one can tell you you are wrong to have that opinion. If you really don't like this modern-day business practice, then don't buy alpha/beta access and don't ever pre-order a game. And then politely suggest to others not to do so either. If enough people stopped buying alpha and beta access and stopped pre-ordering the games, then the companies would stop doing it.
Heh, I guess you're trying to live up to your handle here by explaining this in such a way that it seems you just landed on this planet and learned all these facts yourself just now? Thanks, but this goes under the column "duh".
And if an idiot like me, who knows nothing about game development, can understand this ... so can you.
More condescension when all you did was prove the first two assertions. Facile and smug, always a good combo!
So here's the reality that you don't understand:
- Even though the OP was being sarcastic, they're not wrong on the facts. Game dev companies used to pay or reward gamers to beta test their games, and now people pay for early access. In those days they weren't hiring them in any sense, and they weren't "training them up" to be a professional QA analyst either. All they asked was that you provide the odd update on what you're seeing and give a templated report on any bug you uncover. Sounds a lot like what people do now (but voluntarily), doesn't it? It doesn't mean it's right or wrong, just that it's the reality.
- You don't realize that users ARE testers, they're just not analysts (and the OP never claimed they were). In other words, they're not designing test cases and running them to observe expected or unexpected results, they're exercising a system that WILL HAVE FLAWS because... and this may shock you... software defects are EXPECTED in software systems. We know they're there, we just can't think of every possible use case to uncover them in the analysis phase. So, how do we uncover them? We wrap our code in logs, run-time data feeds, "crash guards" and several other tools to help us understand what just happened and then... GET PEOPLE TO USE IT! You know those choices you get when installing software that ask you something like "Help <Insert Company> by sending reports blah blah blah" that are usually checked by default? If you keep it checked you're a full-fledged tester! (I hope you were sitting down for that)
- While it's fine to point out the history and feel it's a shame that people are willing to pay for what quite honestly IS free labour for software/game companies, it really isn't the company's fault, it's the players'. That's what I smh at, people are happily taken advantage of for the apparent endorphin rush experienced when receiving some perceived reward that only exists as such in the person's imagination. It's really quite sad, but, just like anything else in life, if it's not hurting anyone else they can do whatever they want.
- With that said, a corporation is not a human being with morals and ethics that guide its decisions, it's a money-making machine that is governed by laws and regulations that limit how far it's able to go in the pursuit of said monies. This is why it's rather pathetic that people on this board stick up for FD like they're sticking up "for the devs" or for their "good buddy" DB. News flash people: they want your money. Period. That's your only leverage over them, and you're best off treating it as such. Buying the alpha doesn't "help the company" in the way you think it does. Buy things that are worth your hard earned money (as some on this thread have explained, and I understand), but don't do it "for the devs" or "for the company", that's asinine and leads to bad/lazy products.
As a final point I'll say that the change from companies needing to encourage players/prospective players to help test pre-release products to "lettting" them pay for the privilege pretty much coincided with the expansion of the internet and video games along with it. This allowed all software companies to send themselves data rather than have to coax users to send it to them. Once companies realized that people would
pay for "Early Access" it opened the door to the current lazy development cycles and way overwrought games that companies either never intended to "complete" (e.g. Ark, E: D) or just couldn't maintain a balance between vision and demand (e.g. NMS, CP 2077). Since companies have no moral compass they saw more potential savings in
reducing the size and competency levels of their in-house QA teams (whether you choose to believe it or not). IMO this is why people have been heavily gravitating back to much simpler, old-style (even pixelated) games because at least with those you're not dealing with constant crashes, lag, imbalances and plain drudgery. The saddest part of it all is that consoles used to be a sort of safe haven from this mess but once console makers started allowing this type of software development to pollute the console world we've all been pretty much stuck with it. Sony is the craziest example, as recently as 15 years ago they still required a very very strict level of stability that meant you almost never dealt with crashes or other game-breaking bugs. Now it's almost like clockwork you see those awful blue screens with the error codes on them.
All we can hope is that the continued deterioration of quality leads to more gamers voting with their wallets.
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