So I'm playing a handful of soft launch titles, only one of them has stood out. The rest were "Eh, could have been better but *delete* The game I am still playing has all sorts of problems. PvP matchmaking is horribly broken, daily missions/bonuses seem to switch on and off at random, there are game decisions that have obviously not been made yet, connection issues (for an online only game) etc. It is clearly not ready for primetime. Yet it occurred to me today, after playing for weeks, that there is nothing in the AppStore marking this as a BETA release when it clearly is. Now, I do understand the concept of releasing live but doing it with a smaller audience. See what issues come up, what kind of questions support gets, what breaks in the wild that didn't break in the test lab, etc. From a business standpoint it makes total sense, in a cold logic sort of way. It utterly sucks for the end user though. I knew what I was getting into from the start, but I read Touch Arcade, which only makes up a small fraction of AppStore users. Many people are downloading these soft launch games and unknowingly signing up as beta testers. On the flipside, you get early access to a ton of games! Which is great if they're ready and just need some additional polish. Kind of sucks if you just downloaded a buggy mess to your device. Still, does the early access make up for the involuntary beta testing?
Yeah i agree.. it needs to say that this is a soft launch title in the app information Don't know why this is not a mandatory requierment