Beta duration is unacceptably brief for a pre-order perk (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Monday, July 07, 2014, 12:34 (3792 days ago)

I’d like to echo comments from others elsewhere that the 10 day (minus 2 days for maintenance) beta duration is unacceptably short. Bungie: you spent months advertising the beta as a perk of pre-ordering. Those of us who are familiar with betas in the world of massively-multiplayer online games are used to betas that last several weeks if not months, and so it was not unreasonable to expect something similar.

The betas for the various World of Warcraft expansions lasted between 4 and 8 months. Guild Wars and its sequel had multiple beta ‘weekend’ events, to ensure that people could play en masse during free time (since midweek will rule out a lot of people). Diablo III had a beta that lasted roughly 8 months.

Even ignoring games from other companies, the precedent from your own company is for a substantially longer period, and this for games with a much narrower scope: both the Halo 3 and Reach betas were multiplayer-only, and lasted 4 and (nearly) 3 weeks respectively. Access to both were admittedly perks of buying other games, but at least with those on general release fans could decide if the game was actually worth buying alone.

Two things stand out when looking at how Bungie has conducted itself in the marketing ramp-up for Destiny: a notable PlayStation bias (particularly for PS4), and a strong encouragement to pre-order in order to get into the beta. Given the former, it stands to reason that a large number of Bungie fans will have purchased a new PS4 exclusively to play the Destiny Beta. I myself was about to do the same, but have held off after hearing rumours of the short beta duration.

This is unacceptably fan-hostile behaviour; you’re taking your most loyal customers and essentially asking: how desperate are you? Well here’s my answer: I’m not that desperate. I’ve cancelled my pre-order and I’ll wait to hear how good the game is after it’s on general release.

Throughout the entire run-up to Destiny’s release, I’ve felt like Bungie has been evasive, manipulative and — frankly — arrogant in its dialogue with fans (somebody wake me when Deej learns how to answer a straight question) and this is just the cherry on the cake. I have to assume you’ve got a good game in there somewhere, but this is not the way to go about selling it.