Riot: Beta's no longer useful, daily in-house play tests an option

In a League of Legends post-mortem presentation at GDC today, Riot Games senior producer Steve Snow said the developer insisted staff play the game every day, rather than take new features or bug fixes to beta.

"We would triage daily -- we instituted daily mandatory company playtests," Snow said, as reported by Gamasutra.

"Tons of feedback was coming out of it. We playtested the build that would go out that week."

Speaking of striking a balance between ongoing support and new feature implementation, Snow said the company eventually split into two divisions to avoid a constant shifting of focus between creative work and bug squashing.

On the subject of bugs, Snow commented that the traditional methods of ironing out problems, beta tests, are no longer useful.

"The reality is that this doesn't work anymore. Beta can not be about finding critical or major bugs.

"They're going to get found -- but you have to do everything to find them before your potential customers do.

"The people who come to your product first matter... Meeting their expectations is key to your product's success. You have to be able to follow through on your commitments."