BUT the "big beta" in this case is going to be only like 20,000 keys (citing Ramm) -- not an open beta where everyone and their mother can play it.The big beta will probably be somewhat like a demo from the players point of view. At that point the game is probably nearly finalized and went through a lot of testing already.
Usually big beta's including the COD and BF ones are to actually test things, but actually test things that require people to primarily just play the game.
For pc games think of finding weird hardware software combinations that perhaps do not work. And making sure the software is stable, and that for instance servers can cope with the player amounts.
Finding out what people like and dislike about the game and slightly focussing marketing towards that. Loads of people will try it out and share their experiences with other people on all forums with big betas. So if the game is fun its a great marketing tool to get people to try and play the game before release.
Through stat tracking seeing how balanced certain maps are. Seeing how quickly people progress through different perks and making sure that all perks work.
Probably the last part is actually the reporting of bugs once its at this phase, and a lot of things found might not make it into the first release either. As once you created a fix for a certain bug it needs to be fully tested again etc.
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