I've never been one to get in on videogame betas—save the Diablo 4 one which I did purely to get the horse cosmetic (I then never played far enough to get a horse)—but they're a pretty popular hype-generation mechanism these days. If you've got any sort of live-service thing gearing up for release, why not have a beta? Get some players in, stress-test the servers, and whet everyone's appetite for the full thing.
A sound tactic, and a total nominative falsehood. Per my recent interview with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 lead designer and one of Warhorse's two new creative directors, Prokop Jirsa, calling these little pre-release demos 'betas' just ain't right.
Jirsa was talking about the surprises of his early years in game dev when he mentioned that "Another surprising thing is how bad a game looks and runs up...
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