On another thread, redirected here, Synapse asked:
To which I’d say, the share of the CoG customer base that reads these forums is not large, and many of the folk who would beta test for you are fans who will likely buy the game anyway to show support (and/or to see whether the final version took their feedback into account).
The quality benefit you get from a broad beta is likely to compensate for whatever sales you lose.
In my own case, I’m planning the final beta (with the end of XoR Ch 4) to be only semi-open, not because I fear losing sales but because I want to incentivise a certain kind of engagement with my future WiP threads. And that’s all I’ll say about that for the moment. 