What to Do When Your Game Accidentally Releases Early? Call It a Beta Test. [Whoops]

What to Do When Your Game Accidentally Releases Early? Call It a Beta Test. Middle Manager of Justice, the latest zany game coming from Double Fine (previewed here by Kirk Hamilton) was one of the most downloaded titles on the iTunes App Store when it released on Tuesday. It just wasn’t supposed to release on Tuesday.

While the studio has since pulled the app, it elected to make lemonade from lemons rather than pretend the oopsie never happened. As the game’s project lead explained to Gamasutra, “I guess it kind of just turned into a beta test. I mean, if people find bugs that we haven’t found internally, I’d love to know about them so I can fix them.”

Kee Chi told Gamasutra that they’d set September as a tentative release date for the quirky card/strategy game, but after sending it in to Apple, realized there was too much work to be done to hit that release window. Still “we didn’t want to remove it from the [submission] process in case Apple catches other things we need to take care of, and we didn’t want to do a double submission.”

So his studio’s tech director called to ask why the hell the game was live in every territory earlier this week, and Chi had some explaining to do. Double Fine reached out to gamers on message boards, asking them to become playtesters before the games official release. “I guess it kind of just turned into a beta test,” Chi said.

Double Fine turns an iOS slip-up into an accidental beta test [Gamasutra]