beta testers

northern alcoholic
The developer himself cannot adequately evaluate his work, he needs a look from the side, so I don’t see anything crazy here. If a developer has a lot of money, then he can afford to get a preliminary assessment of his work in order to make it better later. But to take and publish an unfinished game, after which people may not want to play the final version, a studio that has even a little self-respect cannot. After the open beta, some part of those who were waiting for the game will definitely stop doing it. And if this beta is free, the developers will lose a lot of money.

Not all games are interesting, who knows what game will get tested, but you still need to be able to test, so they pay. These are just my thoughts.

In fact, they determine far more than just taste. Moreover, before publishing the game, it seems, the distributors evaluate. should be ... But if the game is completed to the end, then why doesn't anyone from the development team check the quality?

So for the record, in large companies, beta testers are not just schoolchildren, students, but programmers with experience who know the technical part of the error. It even happened that the testers themselves, hired, eliminated these very errors.
In general, testers are also developed, only they need to look for code errors during the game. That's what they get paid for.

Plus, I want to add to everyone that the developers do not have a large amount of various hardware, they usually have new powerful hardware, and in order to check the optimization of the game on different assemblies, you need to install it there, so these ZBTesters themselves evaluate the game as a whole, optimization, the atmosphere of the game , graphics and other components of the game...
I think that testers are an integral part of a well-developed game, and not the one that is released at the beginning of the year, but it becomes playable by the summer.... This is my opinion!!