FYI - They’re serious about the NDA:
Holy shit, his entire library? Is that permanent? Clearly the dude is in the wrong, but that seems like a pretty drastic response.
The signup was pretty explicit. I didn’t read the whole thing in detail, but I would not be surprised if losing your library was called out.
I don’t doubt that, I would imagine a massive corporation like EA would have its i’s crossed and t’s dotted, I just feel like the punishment is far more severe than the action warrants. Kick him out of the alpha, blacklist the dude from future testing, sure. But wiping out the dude’s library could potentially cost him thousands of dollars. And for what, showing people that yep, that’s an alpha! I don’t get it.
To be fair, they could have pursued legal action, suing him for damages done to their brand. Which also would have been thousands of dollars.
I think it’s hilarious, honestly. If you are either dumb or bold enough to not just ignore, but blatantly ignore an NDA by streaming something not intended for public consumption, you deserve it.
I believe that an assumption is being made that these “influencers” are responsible adults capable of, say, balancing a checkbook.
And I believe that this assumption is completely wrong. I doubt most of these worthies know much more than how to load up a game and then activate the streaming function on their console. Fine print is a bit beyond them, and I suspect with their “doesn’t apply to me DURRR” mindset… yeah.
Well to be fair, the fine print of these things can be hell long. I often just assume I can’t talk about, review and certainly not show anything from the game until they send a release of the NDA… which is super weird when they don’t actually lift the NDA. Haha. it’s not a good sign when they do that.
People these days know that they are not going to get sued by a gaming company for breaking an NDA. So they think there aren’t going to be any consequences at all for doing so.
I still think of getting access to a beta or an alpha for free is a privilege… so I try not to abuse that, regardless of legal standings. That might be old school thinking though
That’s what they want you to think. IMO if they are making me a beta tester, they better PAY ME, because I’m doing work for you.
If it weren’t completely voluntary, you’d have a point.
My point is, they want to make it a “privilege” to alpha/beta test their games, so that they can offload work they would normally pay testers to you. Your payment is “prestige”, “oh oh oh I got to alpha/beta test XYZ game, look at meeeeeee!!!111”.
I’m not targeting EA here, I’m talking about almost every developers who allow public to test their game one way or another. My response to them is “get your own QA team to do the work”.
We’re not doing the wok that testers would do in most beta offerings. For one thing, they usually don’t give us the appropriate tools to do it or even even basic instructions on how to report anything. If I spend a few hours playing a game and they just ask for a survey or review at the end of it… that’s not really taking the place of some tester.
EA (early access) is usually closer to what you’re talking about, and that’s not this or most the other alpha and beta testing. Also EA requires payment or buying a game to get access to beta which is not this either.
I agree with @Nesrie. I’ve done bug testing for Nintendo. This kind of testing is not a replacement for that. It’s an adjunct to it. It’s typically focused on server/connectivity issues for one thing. And yes, there will be bugs that are found, many of which have probably already been reported (and perhaps fixed in a different branch). But you are also throwing a lot more people into a live environment withmuch more diverse hardware situations, so new things will arise.
Plenty of people want to do this sort of testing to get an early look at a game they are excited about. No one is forcing them to do it. And good lord, I can guarantee most of the feedback they get is awful. They aren’t being asked to turn in reports of reproducible errors with detailed steps on how to do so.
For a moment I was confused. EA = early access right, not Electronic Arts, maker of Anthem?
Anyway, if you agree that public beta would make a game more polished than it would otherwise be, then you will agree that the public beta testers do some work that their own QA can’t/won’t do. And work should be paid. That is my point.
I’m not against anyone joining public beta test per se. It is just that in general they would have to pay ME, because I don’t buy that privilege stuff at all. It is like a gold star from the teacher, it could mean something. But for me, it only means something from certain teachers.
I’m glad I did the public beta testing for Crew 2, it saved me from buying that game altogether. (I bet this is the OPPOSITE of their intention.)
See this actually bothers me a bit. I want to do better when they give me a means to give feedback, but I don’t really get instructions on how to do that. I mean I work tickets, and I know what I need in order to work a ticket but in this area, sometimes I am standing there and i see a tear in a world but I don’t know how get coordinates or even if they want that info. In Thea 2, I am providing feedback reports but I suspect they’re lacking because i am not sure exactly how to pinpoint the exact issue… events don’t seem to have names, enemies don’t either so I just say things like that blue bat that i think is a vampire thing did this thing that doesn’t seem right. The fact there is an in-game bug report form at all tells me they want feedback which is a lot better than being directed to a forum, out of the game, to report something that isn’t happening anymore.
I don’t agree with this. My participation in any sort of Early Game, whether it be alpha, beta or something along those lines, is voluntary. I know they are not using my participation in this process to replace someone’s actual paid for work because there is no way you could troubleshoot like that. Most of the time they are testing specific things they need more bodies for and that’s fine. They don’t need to pay 10k or 100k people to test their servers or connectivity or any other things they might be testing for. Heck sometimes they tell you it’s Stress Test. If it’s something like that, it’s expected for the servers to go down… they’re testing that. BUt that’s not the same as someone in QA working and following some processes or test scripts or however they do that at all. I’m just mostly having fun, providing little, minimal feedback which might be all automatic and not manual at all.
I might not be getting paid but I am getting something out of it or I would not do it.
Sorry I tried to clarify this more with an edit. It took me years to even look at EA as not Electronic Arts and here i am defaulting to that.
As someone who used to work in QA, I find the switch that devs have been able to pull, from poorly paying game testers, to getting them to do it for free, kind of shocking. P.T. Barnum is applauding in his grave.
What fine print? The 2 paragraph email they sent out clearly said No streaming of the game and no talking publicly. You didn’t have to read the fine print to at least understand that much.