Halo Infinite's beta flight launched seven hours late

**This story about technical hardships, boiled down, in 1:47 minutes.**

What's the fuss?

The first day for the demo of the new Halo game didn't quite go to plan, resulting in a hours delay for fans to get their first hands-on of the highly-anticipated sequel. Such is the purpose of an beta test.

The situation

The Halo games, exclusive to Xbox and PC, is one of the most coveted video game franchises of all time.

The upcoming game in the series, dubbed Halo Infinite, was supposed to release in November 2020 alongside the release of the new line of Xbox consoles.
Thus, fans have been patiently waiting six years for this new mainline entry in the series.

With Halo Infinite confirmed to be releasing this holiday season (hopefully), fans won't need to wait too much longer.

To tease/update the fans, the developers of the game released an in-depth technical video preview as well as a first phase of a closed beta where a select few lucky gamers could stress test the game early.
However, due to the large influx of players trying to get into the beta at once, technical hiccups delayed access for around seven hours.

Boiling it down

All game developers have some form of quality assurance (QA) where the game is tested before release to solve issues that may arise.

This is especially the case for multiplayer-focused games, as they tend to be more unpredictable as players around the globe are playing together at once.
By using players themselves for QA, the developers are able to document more "bugs" that they would have been able to than just relying on a small QA team.

Despite the delay in Halo Infinite's beta test due to technical issues, it's very fortunate that these errors occurred before the game's release, which gives the developers time to repair where necessary.

Had these issues occur after the game's release, fans would be much less forgiving.
An extreme example is the ambitious title Cyberpunk 2077, which released in such a poor state that the game was temporarily taken off store shelves and birthed a number of class action lawsuits against the developer.

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