Why Beta Testing Video Games Is a Must for Studios

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" by Jason Schreier. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Why is beta testing video games important? How could better beta testing have helped Diablo 3?

Beta testing is when individuals are hired to play video games before they’re released. This is a crucial aspect of the game development process because the players may find bugs and glitches that developers missed.

Continue reading to learn more about why beta testing is essential for a good game.

You Can’t Know if a Game Is Good Until You Play It

In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier says that, because video games are interactive, there are additional challenges in determining whether a game is “good”—challenges that, for example, authors and movie directors don’t face. Each of those challenges represents a large number of extra hurdles that developers have to overcome by beta testing video games to make sure people enjoy playing their games.

First, since a player will control the game, developers have to make sure it’s user-friendly, which can be difficult to predict. For instance, the controls should be intuitive, or at least easy to learn. Anything the player needs to know at a glance, like their character’s health, must be on screen without cluttering the field of vision.

(Shortform note: The most common way to address this issue is with a heads-up display (HUD), which puts information the player needs around the edges of the screen. Ideally, the HUD will also add to the player’s immersion—for example, in the Halo series, the HUD is designed to look like the inside of the character’s helmet, with the information displayed on the visor.)

Second, Schreier explains that a good game needs to feel good: The game must respond to player input in satisfying ways. For example, there shouldn’t be a noticeable delay between entering a command and seeing the result onscreen; otherwise, the game will feel sluggish, like a car with poor handling. If there needs to be a delay, as is the case with attacks in fighting games that take time to power up and activate, that delay should be short and consistent. If a game features combat, attacks need to feel impactful—giving the sense that you’ve actually hit your opponent—which is usually accomplished through a combination of visual cues and sound effects.

(Shortform note: A game’s “feel” may be so hard to design and predict because determining it is mostly a subconscious process. Game feel is simply the way your brain reacts—often subconsciously—to the visual and aural feedback you get as you play. As a result, there’s no reliable way to evoke the game feel you want; as Schreier says, there’s no way of knowing what it’ll be until you actually play the game.)

Finally, a game generally needs to be challenging enough that it’s satisfying to beat, but not so challenging that it becomes frustrating. Finding the right balance is often difficult, especially for developers who know their game inside and out. These developers likely know gameplay tricks and strategies that the average player won’t, so they struggle to correctly predict how challenging the general public will find the game.

How Challenging Should a Game Be?

It’s well known that a good challenge—one that’s satisfying but not frustrating—helps you stay engaged with a task. In Atomic Habits, James Clear says that the ideal challenge is one where you succeed about half of the time; if it’s much easier than that, you’ll get bored, and if it’s much harder, you’ll get frustrated.

Schreier discusses the struggle developers face to accurately predict whether or not their game will be too challenging (and thus too frustrating) for the general public. For some gamers, though, challenging games may not be a problem. In games like Dark Souls, the punishing difficulty is actually a selling point; they’re targeted at people who want an intense challenge. That said, some gamers may not want “cozy” games like Animal Crossing—games designed to be relaxing and pleasant—to be challenging at all.

Case Study: Diablo 3

One game that Schreier discusses in detail is Diablo 3, from Blizzard Entertainment. Diablo is a series in which players explore dungeons and fight endless swarms of demons on their quest to defeat the forces of Hell and save the world.

Diablo 3 was in development from 2001 to 2012, an extremely long time even by video game standards, yet Schreier says it was still a disaster at launch. From constantly-crashing servers to a game difficulty that increased far too quickly, there were numerous ways in which the developers had failed to predict and prepare for the difficulties of their game going public.

(Shortform note: Reportedly, Diablo 3’s “development hell”—slang for an unusually long development cycle—was due in large part to the lack of a unified vision among senior development staff. Developers found themselves working on several different versions of the same game, resulting in a lot of wasted time and effort. They even poked fun at the game’s long development period by including a hidden area called Development Hell.)

The first interactivity challenge came from people simply trying to log in. Diablo 3 could only be played online, but it outsold Blizzard’s wildest expectations, and the game’s servers couldn’t handle all the traffic. This meant that many would-be players couldn’t play the game at all. It took several days for Blizzard to strengthen their servers enough to resolve this issue.

(Shortform note: Some games, like Diablo 3, require players to be online, even if they’re playing in a single-player mode. This is called always-on DRM (Digital Rights Management), and it’s meant to prevent game piracy by constantly checking the game’s license—a unique code confirming that you purchased the game legally—while you play. However, always-on DRM creates numerous problems. People without fast, reliable internet connections aren’t able to play these games, and if the servers for a game get shut down, it can no longer be played at all.)

However, even once people were able to play Diablo 3, they encountered numerous frustrating problems because the game was unbalanced. Enemies became too strong too quickly, and becoming powerful enough to defeat those enemies was time-consuming and tedious. Schreier explains that a major part of the Diablo franchise is finding magical weapons and armor to power up your character, but in Diablo 3, such items appeared extremely infrequently.

The balance was so bad that players learned it was more efficient to look for rare items in breakable pots and treasure chests than to hunt down strong monsters (the game’s intended method for finding powerful gear). Although the monsters were slightly more likely to drop magical items, the difference wasn’t enough to make up for the time spent finding and fighting them.

(Shortform note: Testing and refining a game’s balance is normally a crucial part of development, and it’s unclear why Blizzard struggled with this with Diablo 3. Studios usually uncover the issues Schreier describes here through beta testing: allowing people to play a game before its official release to troubleshoot it. Diablo 3 did have a beta testing period, but somehow it didn’t highlight these major problems, which left Blizzard scrambling to fix the game after release.)

Developers also didn’t anticipate the outrage that another feature, the Auction House, would cause among players. It was another option for getting powerful equipment, as it allowed players to spend real money to buy in-game items. Schreier says this feature was unpopular because it turned the game into a “pay-to-win”—players who spent money would have decisive advantages over those who didn’t.

(Shortform note: Diablo Immortal, the next game in the series, is a mobile game that heavily relies on pay-to-win mechanics, and it received a similar backlash to Diablo 3. Despite this, Diablo Immortal was a financial success. It came out in June 2022; by November, it had reportedly made over $300 million, making it a huge financial success for Blizzard Entertainment.)

Why Beta Testing Video Games Is a Must for Studios