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2025 Is the Year of the Beta
🕑 Added 2024-12-30 16:10:05 +0000 UTCMy first post of the new year is ready:
2025 Is the Year of the Beta
Did you know that every baby you’ve met recently is an alpha? Unfortunately for zoomers, that is the official name of the generation slightly younger than them who will mock them mercilessly for affections we won’t know are uncool for at least another decade. But that changes this year because whatever secret council of deranged lunatic wizards who makes the arbitrary decision as to when one generation ends and another begins has declared that the newest crop of infants belong to a new generation that is sure to be tested extensively: the beta generation. Sorry, kids.
We should embrace this dawning era of the betas. Beta doesn’t just have pseudoscientific meanings when applied to wolves, or fanfiction about wolves (don’t correct me if that’s wrong, I don’t want to know more than I already know), or a word appropriated by manosphere dipshits. It also means, most typically for software but increasingly for video- and non-video-games, the beta version of something, i.e., a nearly complete prototype of that thing. In analog games, it may be the first draft before the niceties of editing, art or even layout have been applied.
“DONE is a myth, Complete is a joke, PERFECT is impossible, and SATISFACTION is a lie.” So saith 200-Proof Games in one of the best blog posts of last month (which places it squarely in Bloggie 2025 contention already). The argument in that post is that you don’t benefit from never releasing something until you’re done with it because you’ll never be done. Release it now, grow as a designer, and if you want to update or improve it in the future, you can. But making all those additional (editional) changes without ever releasing it means less growth for you as a designer.
I started off 2024 with a New Years’ Resolution Mechanic Challenge, and 61 bloggers and designers answered the call. This year, I issue a new challenge, a bolder one: Put Out a Beta Edition of Something You’re Working On. Unlike the 1e manifesto, this isn’t something that is basically done but you are still tinkering with. This is something that is explicitly unfinished, where work is still to be done, but it’s more or less playable. Release it this year, comment or tag me or somehow let me know, and I’ll list your beta edition below and tweet (by which I mean post on Bluesky) about it. Let’s make a big deal out of beta releases this year.
Your beta can come in many forms. It could be the more classic beta which is early access version of something you will later finish and release as a shiny (or at least shinier) 1e version. An example would be Sunk Cost, a system put out by my colleague Liz of the Magnolia Keep blog last year not because she was done but because there was a jam going on on itch that her game was a good fit for. That jam was a push to just go ahead and release the dang thing, and that’s great. Maybe this challenge can be that push for you.
Your beta might also be something you will never or plan to never finish. My colleague, Dwiz of the world-famous Knight at the Opera blog, finally decided enough is enough on a long-running hack of Knave he called Brave and released it as “watered-down version” (in other words, perhaps, a beta version) directly on his blog. This is good too! Not only do other people get to strip his game for parts, which is the type of cross-pollination that leads to the flourishing of this hobby, but he gets to hear whatever feedback people have, and even more importantly, gets to excise the project from his mind so he can focus on his many other ttrpg projects (at least two of which are highly anticipated by me).
This challenge would land soggily if I weren’t to also step up myself. And so I shall call my shot: I will release the first public, beta-access version of Prismatic Wasteland, a game I’ve now been working on (to varying degrees) for nearly five years in 2025. If you follow me here, social media, patreon, email lists, discord, or anywhere else I am legally permitted to crow about my games, you’ll be sure to hear about it once I’ve submitted this first hilltop along the mountainous ordeal that is publishing your fantasy heartbreaker. But I hope you’ll join me and make headway up your own mountain. I’d love to read what you’re cooking. Mix a few metaphors, break a few eggs, and in 2025 let’s fucking make something.
