3 ms·

Not really, major companies are already using end users for beta testing, a/b testing and relying on user reports for bug fixes. It's becoming more and more sta

• munk-a 4y ago
  As someone who has worked in game dev - QA is absolutely essential. Beta testing is more of a PR move than anything else - you do potentially get useful automatically collected statistics but surveys are absolutely loaded with rubbish responses making it hard to find good information in the bad. If you want to use Beta testing to do a wide bug sweep you need a QA team anyways to actually sort through all the crap and reproduce the issues - if you expect devs to actually chase down "The game crashed this one time after I built this building" with no attached save file you have no appreciation to how time crunched game devs already are. The other half of what you said, releasing a buggy product and fixing it afterwards - that happens all the time and it's usually a bit PR win since users appreciate "bug fixing velocity" more than they appreciate a bug free game... However, negative patches (where more things are broken than fixed) can be a death knell for a game - one good example of this is the Leviathan DLC for EU4[1]... Paradox spent months afterwards doing PR catch up to try and re-ingratiate themselves with the community. 1. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1416420/Expansion__Europa_Universalis_IV_Leviathan/#app_reviews_hash https://store.steampowered.com/app/1416420/Expansion__Europa...