Ok call me crazy, but I don't want to see an open beta. Here's why-
-The main goal of an open beta vs a closed one is that more people theoretically means more bugs would be discovered. But I think it will not scale that way. You'll get the same bug reported more times.
-You'll get an absolute avalanche of bug reports. Most will be of the same bug but you'll have to categorize them and somehow weed out the duplicates. Theres no way to do that with a computer, it will have to be by hand. You'll probably need someone who understands the code to help categorize them so you know where to start searching for a bug...that takes up a lot of resources.
-I guess a problem I have with it is that an open beta takes away from the surprise of playing a new game. Everyone will want to play a free beta. They'll use that to decide if they want to buy the game. But they'll be playing a crappy, unfinished version of the game. I think you'll lose purchasers of the game because of it.
-It's basically a free trial of the game. So it could generate buzz, but like I said above, buzz isn't always good. See T2.
So what are other options?
-A small closed beta. Downside is you won't find as many errors. Upside is the "surprise" factor of a new game stays there when people first play the game.
-A large (1000+) closed beta. You'll find more bugs but you'll also get leaks where people talk on forums (like this) saying what they think of the game. There's no real way to avoid that. T2 was like this. But for all the errors it found they weren't fixed, which is actually a good point that a beta is only as good as how much time the dev team has to respond. If they waste time with other things instead of fixing bugs then a beta isn't worthwhile.
-Hire a good Q&A team. Find more bugs, get better results, work faster. May miss more obscure hardware related bugs, but that should be rare if the Q&A team is good. Didn't thrax used to do q&a for sierra? I may be mistaken.
So it becomes a cost/benefit analysis. Is paying a good Q&A team more cost effective than a large beta? I think so but I'm obviously not in the industry and am just basing it on intuition. It seems whenever there is an open beta people get tired of the game or talk about it's bugs and don't end up buying the game, ie: Planetside.
Sure players want a free preview of a game before they purchase it. But that can be covered by a seemingly out-dated idea, the demo. Give them 2-3 levels of the single player in a demo and let that generate buzz.
Anyway, I eagerly await the open beta so I can see how the game plays