Closed Beta Blues

There is a lot of uproar right now about the Hearthstone closed beta. There has been a lot of blowback from the community as to just how many keys have been given away, how some have been taken by bots, others sold, or even stolen by those who were supposed to give them away.

The reality is that betas as we know them today are as much a marketing tool as a legitimate way to crowd-source testing your game. We see this commonly across the gaming industry, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing, at all. I love betas because I can often tell whether I’ll like a game before I have to buy it. In most cases for me, beta is synonymous with free trial. That’s not to say I won’t report a bug if I find one.

Betas in general are good for the consumer because they provide a way to test out a product before buying it, it’s a great way for companies to get free testing on a larger scale which with the more complex games these days, is absolutely necessary, and it’s also good because it helps build hype.

So why has the Hearthstone Beta gone so poorly in the eyes of the community?

Sometimes it just goes very very wrong, but I feel that most of the time it’s simple time wasters.

No one likes to invest time into something with no pay-off. In my opinion, it’s one of the main reasons people love MMOs for example. You can track a direct correlation between time invested, and things that tickle that lizard-brain reward system we all have buried deep in our heads. If there is no reward at all, there is a sense of time lost which is extremely frustrating.

The Hearthstone beta key giveaways have been filled with time wasters. And while thankfully I have not personally had to deal with that in this particular beta, I have during countless others. It sucks…it sucks to waste a bunch of time, or having your motor-function taken hostage by your OCD to hit F5 on that damn page that will surely give you the key if you press it just one more time.

But here is where we circle back to what I mentioned earlier. Betas are marketing tools now. Beta key giveaways generate a ton of traffic, which for us as site owners is what puts food on our table, and keeps our servers humming. Your visits to sites matter…a lot. It’s that simple. And so, the people giving away keys think up ways to benefit from that attention, while giving away those keys.

Is that a bad thing? Hell no. We scratch your back, you scratch ours…everybody wins, well kind of. Inevitably not everyone will get a key, but there are definitely ways in which to solve the problem that has thus far plagued the Hearthstone beta key giveaways. And I must of course note, that not all have been bad.

How do you create a system by which beta key giveaways can abide by the following restrictions:

• A level playing field for all participants.
  • Bots, and people with chrome plugins or special software are not given an advantage.
• Requires very little time investment.
• Benefits those who are giving away the keys in some way, whether that be the game publisher (marketing hype) or 3rd party organizations, such as us.

In all fairness, Blizzard is very well aware of the situation and is working on it. I have full confidence in the folks over there that they’ll solve this problem one way or another.

I’d love your thoughts on this topic. Please post your comments and let me know what you think would be the best way for people to give away codes.