VBGamer

You might want to check out Almar's column on Voodoo VB this weekend, its about this very thing =) What I did in the past (for DDCK) was to release a few private alphas to a few friends to test for major bugs. Then once the game was at a playable stage it went into Beta1 where the major bugs where ironed out. After all the bugs were ironed out and more content was put into the game it was released as a public Beta (although after this it turned out many more things needed to be changed!) and after that the final release. I dont think thats the best way to do it though. For my new project I'm going to release a tech demo of the engine (already done) and then a tech demo of the game. Not sure where to go from there though =)