Actually, The Free Open Beta route has been long gone and dead for atleast 2 years now. Almost every subscription based MMO within the last two years has not had a true Open Beta. You have had to pre-order the game and/or had a fileplanet account and/or they handed out a limited number of keys.

The reality of the situation is that it costs afair amount of money to fork out the bandwidth give 100k+'s of people access to a 2gig+ client to download. Even more so when that 100k+ people are trying to download the game all at once.

Then on top of that you have to roll out support earily (before launch) so that they can handle all the open beta players questions and help with bug issues. Then they have to roll out extra servers to handle the extremely larger then launch load of open beta players. All of that costs money.

Back in the day when the MMO scene was new and there was not such a large interest in it. You could have a open beta and you would expect 25k-50k people to download the game and login.

Why would you want to play the beta when you can have the real thing later on? Beta open and closed is or atleast was always done for testing purposes, ex server stress tests and finding bugs. If you wanna find out wether a game is good or bad see reviews check for gameplay videos on youtube etc. This might still not be enough but atleast you can spot obvious flaws, other then that alot of people have "friend invites" left over after buying the game.

i never had payed for a open beta and i never will do it. there are closed betas, in closed betas you have enough time to test anything in your favorite game, and this completly free. the difference between a closed and a open beta is minimal... and this counts often also for the so called "gold" versions.

why is it free? the developers use your machine as a free testing environment: they never could simulate this huge amount of configurations in their own studios. you get not payed for it, you give em free hardware and of course you give em your time. also if you never write one bugreport or one feedback thread in their forums they will benfit just from your participation. 

I'll take back most everything I have said, the Fallen Earth guys are morons.

I will *never* pay a parasitic site like FilePlanet for an "open beta" - and I won't buy games from a totally unknown company without seeing them first....So I hope they got a crapload of money from FP for this because it is pissing off potential customers and will cost them box sales.

Originally posted by ericbelser

I'll take back most everything I have said, the Fallen Earth guys are morons.

I will *never* pay a parasitic site like FilePlanet for an "open beta" - and I won't buy games from a totally unknown company without seeing them first....So I hope they got a crapload of money from FP for this because it is pissing off potential customers and will cost them box sales.

Just like it cost AOC 800k box sales without a "OPEN" beta

Seriously your whole "OPEN" beta thing dosent apply to p2p games anymore only asian wow clones use those.

Originally posted by Gabby-air

Just like it cost AOC 800k box sales without a "OPEN" beta

Seriously your whole "OPEN" beta thing dosent apply to p2p games anymore only asian wow clones use those.

Try again, WAR had an open beta. LotRO had an open beta..so have many other fairly recent launches. So try the "only asian clones" bs someplace else. (Couldn't care less if 800k lemmings bought AoC sight-unseen, I knew it was going to suck on ice without the beta to tell me so.) 

I'm also not saying they will fail because of it or anything of the sort...but they will lose "some" early box sales if they don't open it up and they *have* pissed off some of their potential customers. I'll leave it up to them if the payment they got from FP makes up for it in their minds.

Given how much difference early word of mouth makes, especially for smaller indy games like FE,  I think it was a massively bad call on their part.

Not really. Getting into beta was as easy as sending an email to support@fallenearth.com with the subject of 'I would like a beta key' and they would have given you one. As it is, Fileplanet has been getting people to pay for their 'betas' for over a year now, so why people are taking offense to it now it kinda strange.

Just wait a couple of days and it will be opened to everyone else. That's simply how Fileplanet operates and  why I gave up my membership. They wanted you to pay even more for access to the betas, beyond what you paid them in the first place for no queue downloading. It's up to you whether you feel that it is worth it or not.

The game doesn't go live until Sept. 9th anyway, so you've got plenty of time.

Originally posted by twhint

Not really. Getting into beta was as easy as sending an email to support@fallenearth.com with the subject of 'I would like a beta key' and they would have given you one.

After some digging and trying to get in various ways, from what I can determine that statement has not been true for several months at least. The only way into the stress test or this latest "open" beta if you were not already in was to subscribe to FilePlanet.
FE has now stated, somewhat quietly and just in one thread that there will be a true open beta somewheres in here, but they continue to falsely use the line "register with fileplanet" when you do in fact have to subscribe. Why they have had such a hard time with clear use of the language is beyond me. I can only assume the folks at FP gave them a nice reach-around or something.

From FE forums:

We are running an exclusive promotion with FilePlanet to kick off our Open Beta period. Open Beta began yesterday (August 17), but you must be a FilePlanet subscriber for this promotion. In order to get the early look at Open Beta, FilePlanet subscribers were able to begin preloading the game as early as August 14. Our public beta is forthcoming.

Ive tried to enter the beta, but then i saw i must pay to fileplanet, so i forgot the beta, and forgot this game

Originally posted by ericbelser

Originally posted by twhint

Not really. Getting into beta was as easy as sending an email to support@fallenearth.com with the subject of 'I would like a beta key' and they would have given you one.

After some digging and trying to get in various ways, from what I can determine that statement has not been true for several months at least. The only way into the stress test or this latest "open" beta if you were not already in was to subscribe to FilePlanet.

Actually  I know for a fact they were still accepting testers using that method up to at least the 'Kill the Dev' challenge that was held a couple of weeks ago, as I got some friends to access that method to get into the testing.

Now to be clear, this wasn't for the 'Open Beta'. This was to become a tester in the closed beta portion, which has no difference from the open beta they are pushing forth, since we still have our characters from the closed beta.

Open Beta is simply a marketing tool and people fall for it every time. Since people are waiting to play a game for free, I don't see why people complain. People didn't put forth the effort to play before so now they bitch because they can't play it now? Just wait the week or 2 and then it'll be opened up to everyone.

Actually people are mostly bitching because a) they lied/mis-spoke or however you wish to characterize it; advertising that it was open to anyone who "registered" with FP is entirely different from the reality that the FP deal is only if you "subscribe" and b) because their site and forums have continued to be rather unclear about the true state of affairs.

Secondly, as others have said and as I firmly believe - nothing significant will change in the last 3-4 weeks of a games development. "Open Betas" are nothing but technical stress tests and free publicity, that has been the industry standard for a while now. What is relatively new ( and to me utterly reprehensible business practice) is to cut these promotional deals with parasite sites like FP and to try and profit off what was already a win-win for the company.

PS I'm glad you got some friends in with that method for the "Kill the dev" thing - apparently it worked for some, but not others; much like apparently a few people squeaked past a loophole with FP and got in for free this time.

Originally posted by ericbelser

Actually people are mostly bitching because a) they lied/mis-spoke or however you wish to characterize it; advertising that it was open to anyone who "registered" with FP is entirely different from the reality that the FP deal is only if you "subscribe" and b) because their site and forums have continued to be rather unclear about the true state of affairs.

Secondly, as others have said and as I firmly believe - nothing significant will change in the last 3-4 weeks of a games development. "Open Betas" are nothing but technical stress tests and free publicity, that has been the industry standard for a while now. What is relatively new ( and to me utterly reprehensible business practice) is to cut these promotional deals with parasite sites like FP and to try and profit off what was already a win-win for the company.

PS I'm glad you got some friends in with that method for the "Kill the dev" thing - apparently it worked for some, but not others; much like apparently a few people squeaked past a loophole with FP and got in for free this time.

 

This is merely bitching from the 'not-haves'. You can call it manipulation/misdirection/marketing/etc. but the fact of the matter is, people are complaining that they can't get something for free.

You can bitch all you want about FP's practices, but /you/ are not paying for the storage or the bandwidth to download the client, unless you are a subscriber. And the wording isn't incorrect. FP will open up the beta to everyone else in a couple of weeks. That's how they've been doing it in the past and will do it in the future.

FP is also hardly a parasitical site, honestly. They've been hosting for over a decade now, so have the infrastructure to withstand the massive number of people all trying to download at once, something that most companies don't have and find to be cheaper with FP. The tradeoff is that FP wants to keep the open beta exclusive to its subscribers for a week or 2, so that it can justify the cost of its service, beyond the lack of queues. And this practice is not even close to new. This has been around for quite some time.  While I may not agree with FP's practices, I can understand the business model behind it. I just didn't want to pay extra money for services that I wasn't going to use.

Complaining that you aren't going to buy a game because you don't get to play it beforehand is just plain silly, really. You're simply being impatient and don't want to wait for the game to be released when there will be reviews done for it. Demos are hardly guaranteed and not promised. Playing a game beforehand is a privilege, not a right.

i think they're just trying to trick people into pre-ordering before word gets out on the internet just how bad this game really is.

as for the deal they've made with fileplanet, looks like they ran out of money for advertising, and the deal with fileplanet (which gets fileplanet potentially more new subscribers at $7 a hit, if players are desperate enough to check this new game out) is supposed to take care of the advertising for them. FE isn't exactly being advertised anywhere else that much, and you can only get boxes in the US.

FE isn't ready for release, it really does look like they ran out of money, and given all the unfinished games we've seen over the past couple of years, it's fair that people should get to try out games first before they fork out the price of a subscription.

i'm honestly concerned they're trying to pull a few scam dollars out of gamers.

Originally posted by twhint

Complaining that you aren't going to buy a game because you don't get to play it beforehand is just plain silly, really. You're simply being impatient and don't want to wait for the game to be released when there will be reviews done for it. Demos are hardly guaranteed and not promised. Playing a game beforehand is a privilege, not a right.

You get a big gold star on your forehead for this.

I'm getting pretty sick of the prima donnas in the gaming community. Between the temper tantrums and bitchy attitudes, I'd say a lot of these people are more drama queen than gamer.

Originally posted by Mischiff

You keep MISSING THE POINT !

and ive been playing a long time, way before WOW came out or was even thought of ...

the POINT IS .. most MMO's have always offered a FREE OPEN BETA   duh... thats the point.

Fallen Earth isnt, you only get in if u pre order the game or if u pay to belong to openplanet, either way u r paying !

 

the point ..

I think you are missing the point. That game companies are a business 1st, and just because you paid attention to products the business puts out does NOT entitle you to a free slice.  Apply this logic to any other business with a tangible product and its the same. 

Also as has been mentioned, lots and lots of people got to beta test without spending a dime.

On a similar note, i followed AoC for 5 years before its release, I never got an beta invite, and had to buy the game to try it.  I wasn't butt-hurt over not getting a beta invite, nor did I bitch and moan about the way Funcom was doing things. I tried it on my own time and decided for myself wether I liked the game or not.

Originally posted by kallista

i think they're just trying to trick people into pre-ordering before word gets out on the internet just how bad this game really is.

 

as for the deal they've made with fileplanet, looks like they ran out of money for advertising, and the deal with fileplanet (which gets fileplanet potentially more new subscribers at $7 a hit, if players are desperate enough to check this new game out) is supposed to take care of the advertising for them. FE isn't exactly being advertised anywhere else that much, and you can only get boxes in the US.

 

FE isn't ready for release, it really does look like they ran out of money, and given all the unfinished games we've seen over the past couple of years, it's fair that people should get to try out games first before they fork out the price of a subscription.

 

i'm honestly concerned they're trying to pull a few scam dollars out of gamers.

I honestly think you're talking out of your ass, because you certainly don't know what you're talking about here.

Fact  #1: Software is a product that people will buy knowing that it is broken out of the box. This is because it can be fixed with patches and such later on, with new features added after the fact as well, though this line is being blurred with the whole DLC thing.

Fact #2: Software sells without a hands-on demo. There are other ways to market the game, such as reviews, trailers, screenshots, etc. Demos are not guaranteed and if you look at the best-selling software out there, most likely, there wasn't a demo for the game beforehand. It came out after the game was released. Implying that the lack of a playable demo is because a company ran out of money is, frankly, simply you talking out your ass.

Fact #3: Hosting files and making them available for download costs money. A lot of companies don't want to deal with it, or put their networks out there for potential security risks, so they pay a third party, ie. Fileplanet, who is experienced in this type of thing, has the infrastructure in place, and is willing to do it for a couple of weeks early access to the beta, to do it for them.  Implying they did it because they ran out of money is simply another example of your ignorance and that you are, again, talking out of your ass.

This argument crops up every time a new 'open beta' comes out, because Fileplanet is the one that the companies use to market their open betas. It happened before and it'll happen again. Implying it's insidious and new and a conspiracy is simply you talking out your ass.

Originally posted by twhint

This is merely bitching from the 'not-haves'. You can call it manipulation/misdirection/marketing/etc. but the fact of the matter is, people are complaining that they can't get something for free.

You can bitch all you want about FP's practices, but /you/ are not paying for the storage or the bandwidth to download the client, unless you are a subscriber. And the wording isn't incorrect. FP will open up the beta to everyone else in a couple of weeks. That's how they've been doing it in the past and will do it in the future.

FP is also hardly a parasitical site, honestly.Complaining that you aren't going to buy a game because you don't get to play it beforehand is just plain silly, really. You're simply being impatient and don't want to wait for the game to be released when there will be reviews done for it. Demos are hardly guaranteed and not promised. Playing a game beforehand is a privilege, not a right.

You can call it whatever you like. *I* am not complaining about not getting something for free, frankly I couldn't care less, $7 is meaningless. I *am* commenting on what I see as bad business practices, something you seem incapable of  comprehending preferring instead to project  assumed motivations onto people.

The wording of the announcement from FE *is* slimey, reinforced by their unwillingess to clearly/prominently state the actual situation on their own forums or website. You can defend it all you like, I see it as yet another bad call by management at an MMO.

I consider FilePlanet to be parasitical because they charge for subscriptions, there are several other sites that provide similar levels of professional hosting free of charge. I consider FE contracting with them to be another bad call because it is deliberately pushing off what is essentially an advertising cost onto the customer.

For clarity: I am not "complaining" that I am not going to try a game without trying it, I'm stating it. You can keep supporting the current industry standard of "chuck some POS out in a box to recoup investment" all you want. Saying that playing a demo is a privelege is just moronic, it's the equivalent of saying that taking a car for a testdrive is a privelege - neither is, they are sales gimmicks designed to entice you into buying a product.