Acclaim ditches dedicated testers, welcomes community overlords

Sounds like what EA does with the Battlefield franchise.

Difference is they make you pay full dollar for the beta.

Best. Picture. Ever.

Speaking as a dedicated tester, I can honestly say that no good will come from this.

And quality continues to decline...

If anyone needs to start pinching pennies, it's Acclaim.

People used to be paid to test games...

now everyone gets the opportunity to play the game before it comes out thus ruining its hype so to over compensate betas will be huge hype events so a game gets 30 seconds of fame now(if its good) first for the beta then the final version, this could either be really good, or an incredibly horrible move. This could cause marketing to explode into pushing the beta's on everybody and wasting more money on that than actually making a good game, because i trust the opinion of a dedicated tester who knows what to look for over some 13 year old punk who wants to see tits

David Perry, why must you make Dawson cry?

Perhaps I'm being a bit skeptic, but this appears to have disaster written all over it. I'm guessing the community of testers are getting paid little to nothing? At least it's still better than outsourcing testing tasks to other countries

You don't test the game. The contributions on the players' parts apparently will be much more aggressive and I would suggest reading the site to find more about it. ;)

AWESOME PICTURE BTW

#7 - Seriously, David Perry. Young Dawson Leery is just trying to earn some cash for film school. He already lost his childhood crush to his best friend, why do you have to go and take his job too?

IDONTWANNAWAIT..

Jared Rea might have just become my favorite joystiq blogger. Just for that f*cking picture, and I'm not even kidding, I'm still laughing Jared!!! Thank you for making the last hour of work a little more enjoyable.

Sometimes the problem isn't the testing but taking the resources and time to fix the bugs that pop up. That's where upending the tea table comes in to make sure the game is playable. Also that's a funny picture keep up the good work.

I've been a dedicated tester in the past, and I continue to be both an a closed beta and (occasionally) alpha tester, and I also can say no good is going to come from this

MMO players are a very fickle bunch. If the community isn't satisfied with the service, the whole project could go up in flames. There is also the problem of bugs that are left unreported because hackers want to exploit them.

Business Math 101:

Your business is floundering. Time to cut costs. Do you fire:

A): 10 guys who make $8/hr, with no OT pay.

B): 1 Out of touch President of Marketing who makes $150K/yr.

If you chose A, buy yourself a new Mercedes on the company dime!

Let the Acclaim layoffs begin! Just like the Acclaim
of old.

yeah, this can only lead to trouble.
i have done 5 or 6 betas, i have come across problems, didn't really know how to report them, and still don't know what to look for.
hooray for poor quality.

yeah, this can only lead to trouble.
i have done 5 or 6 betas, i have come across problems, didn't really know how to report them, and still don't know what to look for.
hooray for poor quality.

Good lord, now Acclaim is getting lazy enough to virtually let consumer design a game for them. What they're not gonna tell you is that most of them will suggest that acclaim make a carbon copy of WoW. Seriously, consumers don't know what they really want in a game, I know I don't go into a game saying, "This game has to have this feature, this one, and this other one before I'll call it good."

The testing side of this is a no-brainer, consumers "beta-testing" the game generally either don't know what to look for to report bugs, don't know how to report them, or just don't care because they are getting to play this game that's not supposed to be out for 5 more months. Sure the dedicated testers won't catch everything, but chances are the things they don't catch won't be found by players(unless the game is as buggy as Oblivion, I'm really not sure they tested that game beyond the main quest).

I'm not sure if you were trying to be silly or just being a dick, but you write as though David Perry were some johnny-come-lately to the game world. Perry is practically an industry legend. If he says that bug testing can be done without a dedicated team, he at least has over two decades of experience to back his opinion up.