Future Tense: A Beta Way?

Posted 03/25/2010 at 4:43pm | by David Gerrold

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In February, Blizzard opened the Starcraft II battlenet for beta-testing.  Hooray for Blizzard!

There are many good reasons for beta-testing.  It’s not always about bug-stomping.  In this case, it’s just as important to have the playability of the game tested under actual user conditions.  This is the same kind of beta-testing Blizzard did with Warcraft III before it was released.  Throughout the beta-test, they continued to tweak the balance of Warcraft III units.  At the time of this writing, Blizzard has already made several changes in Starcraft II unit abilities, build times, and strength.

Starcraft II looks spectacular, of course.  It has marvelous 3D graphics, terrific sound effects, great music, and the game-play is very exciting.  (If I have a complaint, it’s not about the game, but about the tactics of some players — the ones who are so eager to annihilate the other guy right from the git-go that neither side gets a chance to experience some of the advanced tactical possibilities.  The game is over before you’ve built your first Thor.  I had this same complaint about some players in Warcraft III.)

But this isn’t a review, it can’t be because the game isn’t officially released yet, and when it is officially released, there will be so many other people writing reviews that anything I might say here would be redundant.  That disclaimer aside, I will say that so far Starcraft II is everything I hoped it would be.  I’m sure that one of the benefits Blizzard enjoys from an open-beta like this is that it gets the fan-base so excited and enthusiastic that they’ll be lining up at the stores the day the boxes hit the shelves.

Last year, Microsoft also had an open-beta program for Windows 7.  First they made the beta version available to the general public, then the release candidate.  This gave a lot of users, myself included, a chance to get into the OS early and that created a positive buzz for Windows 7 months before it shipped.  The beta program helped Windows 7 prove itself as a worthy successor to Windows XP.  It served as a much-needed public redemption after the ill-received Vista.  (Vista wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that good either.)

But the beta-tests of Starcraft II and Windows 7 aren’t just beta-tests to see how the software will perform in the wild, they’re also some very clever try-before-you-buy marketing.  You can only do this with a product that can pass the sniff test, that will withstand the rigorous and brutal pounding that hardcore users will subject it to and come out the other side (mostly) unbloodied.

The first really successful use of try-before-you-buy marketing was shareware.  For most users in the eighties, the most iconic shareware publisher was Apogee.  They gave away their games—well, the first ten levels anyway.  They published Commander Keen and Duke Nukem and other great platform games that were perfectly suited for a VGA display.  If after ten levels, you liked the game enough to want to continue, you sent in a check and they sent you a disk with twenty more levels.

This worked spectacularly when Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992.  Wolfenstein 3D was the game of the moment.  It was also a great way to demonstrate how powerful your machine was at a time when every clock cycle counted.  Suddenly it seemed as if every vendor at every Computer Faire was running Wolfenstein 3D in full screen mode.   It was eye-catching and it sold a lot of shareware disks.  More cartoon Nazis could die in a single swap meet weekend than during the entire Battle of the Bulge.  The game was a breakout hit and it transformed the gaming market.

A year later, id software released Doom, an even more spectacular FPS.  Today, that first Doom looks as quaint as the original Star Trek.  But at the time it was bind-moggling, there was nothing else like it, and its impact was exponentially greater than Wolfenstein 3D.  Doom immersed you into a nightmarish, unrelenting world, terrifyingly scored by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails.  Its dark emotional core disturbed almost everyone who played it.  It was the Star Wars of video games and it affected everything that came after.  Doom set the standard.  Games had to be environments.

As with Wolfenstein 3D, the first ten levels were free—and when you got to the tenth level, you got slammed with a pair(!) of Minotaurs that seemed impossible to kill.  Most players were reaching for their checkbooks even before they got that far.  Like Wolfenstein 3D before it, Doom gave credibility to try-before-you-buy marketing and many other game publishers, large and small, had to adopt that profit model to compete.

But even today, not every publisher feels comfortable giving away their product, game or otherwise.  So we still have “nagware” and “cripple-ware.”  After the free trial period, nagware interrupts you with incessant reminders to pay for the software.  Crippleware is even worse.  The functionality of the program is disabled until you pay for a key, sometimes so severely you can’t really judge if the program will actually meet your needs.  But nagware and crippleware are disrespectful of the customer, and publishers who make this mistake rarely capture a significant market share.

Most users like freeware, or its close cousins, “donation-ware” and “upgrade-ware.”  Upgrade-ware is freeware with a pay-for-the-upgrade button.  Fences (a desktop icon manager from Stardock, http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/) is free for personal use.  If you like it, you can buy the pro version that has even more features.

With donation-ware, the program is free.  You never have to pay for it.  If you find it useful, you click on the Paypal button and donate whatever you feel the software is worth to you.  Some publishers have a suggested donation.  CCleaner is one of the better examples of donation-ware.  Go to http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download.

The ultimate freeware is simply free.  No strings attached.  Often, the software is given away as a loss-leader.  It gets you to the website.  If you like how well the free software works, you take a look at the publisher’s other offerings.

Each of these methods has its own unique advantages, for both publishers and user.  But the best advantage of freeware as a marketing ploy is that it gets you the widest possible distribution for the least possible expense.  If your software is good enough to capture its product niche, it can even become a defining standard.

There’s one other “freeware” distribution method that I want to mention — it’s called piracy.

I don’t like piracy, I don’t advocate it, I don’t endorse it — but despite my disapproval, people still keep downloading illegal copies of software.

It seems to me that software publishes walk a tightrope.  They cannot make their software too restrictive or they’re punishing their own customer base.  Paying customers experience crippling restrictions as disrespectful and annoying.  And pirates always create workarounds anyway.  (None of which I will discuss here.)  But publishers cannot make their software too easy to copy either.

There’s an uncomfortable point to be made here—that the level of piracy is a good indicator of the demand for a product.  The question is how to turn that demand into payment for legal copies.  That’s why try-before-you-buy marketing serves as one of the better answers to bootleggers.

Try-before-you-buy respects the customer, it allows him/her to work with an authorized copy (giving the publisher much more accurate information about the user base), and it removes the risk of black-hats adding malware to the download.  It also helps to distribute the software rapidly and establish it as a credible presence in the community.

Now, excuse me.  I’m going to create a street-gang of Dark Templars and kick the crap out of that guy who keeps swarming me with hydralisks.

David Gerrold is a Hugo and Nebula award-winning author. He has written more than 50 books, including "The Man Who Folded Himself" and "When HARLIE Was One," as well as hundreds of short stories and articles. His autobiographical story "The Martian Child" was the basis of the 2007 movie starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet. He has also written for television, including episodes of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Twilight Zone, and Land Of The Lost. He is best known for creating tribbles, sleestaks, and Chtorrans. In his spare time, he redesigns his website, www.gerrold.com