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Speaking at the 2007 Independent Game Conference in Austin (reported by Gamasutra), Tabula Rasa creator Richard Garriott has revealed he feels releasing such an early beta, at a time when the game wasn’t fun to play, was a big mistake.
“I actually think the biggest mistake was made not by the marketing department, but by the development team. We invited too many people into the beta when the game was still too broken.
“We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn’t yet fun,” said Garriott. “As we’ve begun to sell the game, the people who hadn’t participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters.”
It’s been a difficult task to get the early beta players back and interested in the final game explained Garriott: “… we’ve had to go back to and say ‘look, look, we promise: we know it wasn’t fun two months ago, but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.’ We’ve had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it.”
That’s not to say Garriott doesn’t believe early user access isn’t a positive thing, praising the approach taken with Guild Wars and its small-scale friends-and-family testing.
“Only about two or three weeks before launch did they do the ‘open it up for pretty much anybody to play,’ when the game was basically done,” said Garriott.
Tabula Rasa officially opened its public servers on November 2.
