It's taken 500 people five years to produce and is intended to be the
first part in an ongoing space opera that will span multiple games over
the next decade. The studio behind it, Bungie, was given a budget bigger than
many Hollywood blockbusters after the success of its earlier Halo games.
Yet it still felt the need to first host an "alpha" and then a
"beta" public test fairly late in the day, allowing large numbers of
players the chance to shoot-and-loot across fairly extensive areas of
the unfinished title for free. If publisher Activision was confident enough to boast that
Destiny would be the "best-selling new video game IP [intellectual
property] in history" in February, why were these two trials
subsequently needed?Was it really to make a better game, or could it be a tactic to hook gamers into pre-ordering new titles?
Games developers have long carried out tests to collect
valuable data and feedback that they can then use to shape their
finished products. In fact, the idea of public alphas and betas has been around
on the PC for a long time, with shooters such as Unreal Tournament and
Counter-Strike popularising the concept in the late 1990s.
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