Anyone who’s delved into gaming anytime in the past decade will have become all too familiar with the new industry standard, something that many players will claim to dislike but still partake in for something that piques their interest. The early release cycle of releasing a game in a playable beta, updating quickly over a few months, and then moving into full release seems to be the new normal, and while the $70 price tag attached to some of these games does seem a bit much, this practice shows no signs of slowing down either.
This has become the same across all platforms, too. While mobile still dominates as the king of the gaming market with plenty of great options as sites like Goldenbet offer a huge library of niche games, there are still studios within the space that take advantage as microtransactions have become so common, release a game for free that’s just about ready, hope to land a couple of whales, and repeat the cycle. While there are, of course, a huge number of issues with this approach, mostly that a game is never truly in a great state, players have become so familiar with it that it tends to be overlooked.
The most recent example of this, and something that may become closely followed in the gaming industry, has been Valve’s latest launch of Counter-Strike 2 – whilst it’s largely just an upgrade to the previous title of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, moving it onto a new game engine and making some other tweaks, the game has received mixed feedback early on with many believing the launch to be rushed, particularly as the release of this game has restricted access to the previous working title.
Whilst the game doesn’t have the official designation of still being in beta, many believe that’s what it is – but is it all that bad? With the game surpassing one million concurrent players on September 28th, that’s a huge audience to quickly test through all aspects of the game, feedback bug reports, and make headway on the big changes that will eventually be needed. The much needed feedback from such a huge audience may help accelerate the game into a playable state, with the expectation that tournaments will once again pop up in a short period of time and bring back esports betting to the Counter-Strike franchise.
It’s not always the beta on-release games that cause issues. Another huge September release in Bethesda’s newest blockbuster of Starfield shows the other side of the coin. However, whilst Counter-Strike may be more excusable as a free game, with the huge price tag associated with the game and the large number of bugs that still exist for a game that’s technically experiencing a full release there should be an expectation that many of the kinks would be ironed out, at least bugs can be expected from beta, but a full release is something else entirely.
For now, it doesn’t seem like there will be any change to this approach taken by major studios. It’s certainly considered valuable enough for major studios to continue taking the beta approach and follow that feedback cycle, and with most casual players not really paying much attention to this sort of approach either, it has been very effective – where a vocal minority online may suggest a beta cycle is the end of days for gaming, there are some great positives that have come from this approach and plenty of reasons to be excited for future releases that may also look to follow a similar approach too.
