What does it mean to be in an open beta, anyways? (or “how do you build MMOs as a web service?”)

Last week our first MMO went into open Beta, and maybe you’re wondering what means.

Most traditional games, even online ones, have discrete development cycles and ‘formal launches.’ These development cycles are usually marked by a fixed point in time when the game is “live” and “launched.” We’re not like that.

We’re building our MMOs as you would a web service. We’re always evolving them based on actual player behaviors (we’re paying attention!) and what we think you might enjoy. As with all of your favorite web services, our MMOs are constantly evolving. We’re testing new areas, new features, new levels, new user interface elements on an ongoing basis.

We look at it this way: You wouldn’t want to read a news site that wasn’t updating its headlines constantly or use a wiki that people weren’t contributing to or participate in a social network that didn’t have real time feeds and ever changing content based on your social context — why should the online games you play be any different?

We’re building organic, live web services. Every time you come to City of Eternals, we hope you notice new content, new improvements to the user experience, and new fixes to issues players have been reporting. We’re changing the game every day, every week.

If you’re expecting an old school MMO where you have to periodically download a giant patch, or go to the store to buy another expansion, that’s not us.

With ohai’s handcrafted MMOs, we want you to experience additions and improvements as fast as hitting your browser’s Refresh button. We’re able to do this because we built a significant amount of technology & tools that allows us to iterate at web speed. As our writer Wagner James Au puts it “I love how we can add missions to our MMO about as quickly as adding a blog post in WordPress.”

It’s this same technology that enabled us to get our first MMO (yes, there are more coming!), City of Eternals, to an alpha launch in 9 months with 3 core engineers.

So what open beta means for us is that the game is now stable enough to allow new users to begin to enter our game world. We’re not nearly done making huge improvements to the user experience and to the gameplay, but we’ve made significant strides since our private alpha.

The open beta period will be accompanied by constant improvements. The game in 30 days will be dramatically better than the game you see today. At some point in the near future, we’ll be ‘fully live and launched’ but all that means is that the game is pretty stable and performing well, and our core set of initial features has been completed.

Even after we’re fully launched & live, we’ll be making ongoing edits and improvements every week. But that’s a blog post for another time.

Hope you guys are having fun out there,
Susan

p.s. Btw, here’s a photo of my sweet, sweet pad in City of Eternals.
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