Tabula Rasa hurt by beta testers
Richard Garriott, the man behind the sci-fi MMORPG Tabula Rasa, said that inviting a high number of beta testers when the game was still very unpolished, really hurt their creation in the end.
Speaking about the game’s marketing, Garriott actually said: “I actually think the biggest mistake was made not by the marketing department, but by the development team. We invited too many people into the beta when the game was still too broken.”
The producers went as far as to say that, in the end, they had to contact those beta testers and inform them Tabula Rasa is not broken anymore, and that they should come back and try it: “We’ve had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process”
Personally I haven’t tried Tabula Rasa yet, but I hear it’s a pretty decent MMORPG, after all Garriott knows what he’s doing, he’s not exactly new to the game.
