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Gears boss: It's "really hard" to do technical betas

Gears of War 3 producer Rod Fergusson has said that it's difficult these days to do technical betas. Who knew?

Speaking at a Gears of War 3 event in London yesterday, Fergusson told Strategy Informer that expectations have shifted due to users moving from the more open PC to the closed console.

"In PC days people were used to swapping out video cards, putting in their own memory, formatting your own harddrive... you were kind of your own tech support so the idea of having an unfinished product to play with and be involved with it was exciting," said Fergusson.

"But when you move to the black box of the console it was sealed, and if you opened it you voided the warranty and so it was much more hands-off."

He went on to add: "The idea of a console beta that's an unfinished product is really foreign to that audience and so their expectation is that this is representative of the quality of the game and they have to judge it on this.

"It's really hard to do betas then because you have to make it so polished and so far along that it's hard to get the feedback you want."

Epic is set to launch a multiplayer beta for Gears of War 3 on April 25 - or on April 18 if you have a copy of Bulletstorm - before the main game launches on September 20 worldwide.

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About the Author

Johnny Cullen

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Johnny has experience at a wide range of games media outlets, having written for Eurogamer, Play Magazine, PC Gamer, GameDaily, and more. He worked at VG247 pumping out news at an astonishing rate for several years. More recently, he founded the games website PlayDiaries.

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