Playtester's thoughts on Project A (Riot Games New FPS Tactical)

As the world's foremost Artifact critic (not really joking) let me address this a bit.

It was obvious from the jump that Artifact had potentially serious issues, most notably the 3 lane structure. The reason people agreed that the game was great is that Valve used the testing period of Artifact as a marketing tool. This is also, not coincidentally, part of the reason why the game turned out to be a disaster.

The Artifact testing pool was populated by Valve superfans, people with close relationships with Valve (either personal or financial), streamers who were looking to become Artifact streamers after release, etc. This is also how Valve rolled out testing of the Steam controller as well, targeting friends of Valve who they knew would provide positive public feedback.

There's an understanding in situations like these that if you test a game and publicly make negative comments about it you probably won't be invited back, or used by other companies. You probably won't be invited to invite-only tournaments, you won't get to stream exclusive announcements, etc etc. And in many cases this understanding is enforced by NDA - you're only allowed to make videos describing your testing if what you have to say is positive.

I'm not saying that this Riot tester is lying, but this sort of feedback is useless, because there are strong systems and incentives in place to make sure that the feedback that gets to the public is positive. If nothing else it's just poor business sense to test a game and then bash in publicly.

It should always be your understanding that positive public comments about a game in non-open alpha / beta are part of the overall marketing strategy.

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