Beta testing

pay your money and download the current build of the beta..

You`ll get the final version

After all you did buy the full version of E&B did you not?

Well...typically Beta testers dont PAY to beta test. Earth and Beyond was free. We, as Beta testers, are doing a service to the gaming industry by giving our time, effort, and talents to make their games work well for release. We are compensated by the industry by being allowed to test out the newest and coolest software.

BlueOzone

I beta tested Warcraft III and didn't get the final version for free.

'We, as Beta testers, are doing a service to the gaming industry by giving our time, effort, and talents to make their games work well for release. We are compensated by the industry by being allowed to test out the newest and coolest software.'

As much as you may believe to the otherwise, that is almost never the case. Beta testing, by and large, is either done in-house, or by paying customers who volunteer to help with the near-release testing.

In those few cases where the public beta tests are done by non-paying customers, the base program was usually free anyway.

Well, I don't think that I had to pay to beta test Asheron's Call, but with Microsoft holding the purse, they can afford that.

It's not so much paying to beta test Gal Civ as pre-ordering it and getting the added bonus of beta testing.

I somewhat disagree. Strangely, you are all forgetting an important dimension here. We are not really paying Stardock to beta-test since we are participating interactively in a special kind of evolving "beta", where the user can offer suggestions that effectively impact the creation-process of an unfinished game. Stardock does listen to its customers and does try to integrate their suggestions, whereas in most betas, the non-employee testers merely experiment with a game that is completed (or almost). For example, 'Master of Orion 3' is scheduled to be released at the end of November, and the developers are currently recruiting, through a gimmicky contest, 25 non-employee beta-testers: those lucky devils will test a product that is 99.98% completed, they won't have any input whatsoever on the design & development of MOO3. By contrast, GalCiv's "beta-testers" are effectively collaborating in an on-going development process--for a very, very small sum, which also includes access to Drengin's other free games. Nobody is really paying here to "beta-test" in the usual sense. [Please note that I am not an employee of Stardock and that my opinions, here, are purely personal and free of any interest.] :notsure:

So how is Earth & Beyond anyway??