Blizzard responded to these issues in an interview at Eurogamer with the game’s general manager, Rod Fergusson Diablo 4 Gold. Eurogamer asked: “Did you have a metric for success for this weekend, something in particular that you were looking at? And if you did have one, did you meet it?”

Now, I’m of two minds on this one. Obviously, a beta exists to test the game at scale similar to what you might encounter at launch, and certainly more than what you can achieve with play-testing. Whether a developer is looking for bugs or performance issues or testing out connectivity under stress with an online game, a beta can help illuminate problems. These can then be fixed and everybody is happier come launch day.

On the other hand, if the word beta has become “twisted’ it’s only because of the game industryincluding Activision-Blizzardusing betas as “‘marketing betas” all the time. This includes last weekend’s Early Access Diablo IV beta which was for pre-order customers only (unless you did the KFC deal or found some other promotion).

I’m pretty sure that making beta access a pre-order bonus is a type of marketing, creating an incentive for consumers to pick up the game ahead of release buy Diablo IV Items. The word beta may indeed mean “demo” now, but that’s by design. That’s the logical outcome of making betas pre-order bonuses or tied to particular perks or platforms.