- Joined
- Jan 15, 2019
Not that I'd go as far as calling these developers "professionals," but that terminology is fairly reasonable. "Alpha" and "Beta" releases have specific meanings, despite how much abuse the words have endured in the past two decades.
Projects like these go in four general phases:
Pre-alpha: it hasn't been released (i.e. there's no version of it out in the wild), it's still under active development, and at least some substantial functionality and/or content isn't implemented (or merged) yet. This is by far the longest phase. You're making textures, modeling characters and environments, recording voiced dialog, coding the engine, writing the story, etc. at this stage.
Alpha: it's content- and functionality-complete, barring adjustments from internal testing or last-minute tweaks and changes. All the assets that'll be in the final product are either already in, or in the pipeline for inclusion "real soon now." All the "creatives" who are suddenly idle have been shifted (in a good studio, anyway) into full-time testing of the game, like an internal QA team. Testing is ongoing, using exclusively internal resources within the studio. This is a somewhat lengthy phase too, since it's the start of the first real shakedown cruise with all the parts in place.
Beta: "it's done," and all that's left is more testing (using resources from outside the studio, whether it's another studio, a third-party QA group or company, or even a public beta). When a project moves from "Alpha" to "Beta," it's feature-complete, major bugs have been squashed, and generally speaking there will only be as many "Beta" builds as needed to resolve last-minute issues. If you're calling it a "Beta" and still adding content or features, you dun goofed. This phase isn't supposed to take all that long. If you're stuck in "beta" for months, you dun goofed.
Release: At some point, whether prompted by the publisher or just by testing revealing it's good enough to ship, the latest "Beta" version gets a quick rebuild as-is and promoted to "Release," which is the final product that goes out the door.
Obviously since these guys are reporting delays, they're still having trouble getting their shit together, and by year five there really shouldn't be any lingering problems with their game engine, asset pipelines or IT infrastructure, so they're either revamping major chunks of the game's content or they've hit some kind of unexpected hard limit on what their engine can do, or they've run out of money and are throwing out a delay to buy time while they beg for more.
