One of the reasons Betas became the new Demo is that the vast majority of "testers" had no interest in reporting bugs and just wanted to play the game as soon as possible and for free.
Beta testers might be part of the developper team and therefore paid (service charged on customers as it must)
As part of their work, beta testers must report bugs.
You'll notice Betas once were the full game but eventually they only offered one or two maps. This is especially evident with EA games like the Battlefield series.
After the crowdfunded scene set the trend of monetizing access to uncomplete products, it was a matter of time before the big guys accessed the idea and take it as their own.
Developers also employ a Quality Assurance team to do most the testing, but in online games it's often useful to do a "stress test" and load the servers with as many players as possible and see how it holds up. Having a Beta test often serves this purpose and gives some indication of how many players are likely to be playing on launch day. It's very important to be able to deal with launch day without having any connectivity issues otherwise players will rage and post 0/10 reviews as we've seen in Diablo3 and many other games.
Test stress versions are usually not betas. Pointless to try this stuff with a beta version.
It's certainly not theft!
Charging for a service that is not delivered is theft. When customers pay for a gold version, delivering them a beta version is theft.
It did have an early access period and a consequential "day one patch" addressing the issues for the full launch.
This product is built on the crowdfunded products model.
Again, this is nothing new. Expansion packs have been around since Warcraft. The bigger threat is withholding launch content as part of the DLC plan. You would have noticed that all games from big publishers MUST have a DLC plan and often full priced games, like Anthem, have the same paid cosmetics that you'd expect from a free2play game. This is far more to do with corporate greed than it is "copying crowdsourced games".
Having DLCs and expansion plans has nothing to do with it.
A product might be released complete on its own, with no access until it has reached that stage. Later, it might be augmented with various expansions.
This has nothing to do with the crowdfunded model with products released on purpose uncomplete.
Can you give me an example of a crowdfunded game that the big publishers are copying for their business model?
Games, hard because the crowdfunded scene does not deliver that many games.
Now, crowdfunded products, citing one would be unfair either to the one or to all the others that follow the model.
Picking any of them randomly should be enough to find an example. Like asking to cite one specific bird that can fly. Take one at random and it is very likely it flies.
In some special circumstances, like Star Citizen, where the funding doesn't end, you can see there's no point in ever releasing a game because it's far more profitable to continue selling people their dreams than allowing people a chance to write negative reviews which could harm further funding, but this does appear to be an isolated case. I'm sure the big publishers would love to make Star Citizens $250,000,000 without having to release a game, but it's not something they can actually emulate.
That is making a specific case of a general case. SC might be better than others at the crowdfunding scheme, they are still playing the same scheme.
For other crowdfunded products, the funding does not end. With every sale made during the early access period, the funding does not end.
SC funding will end the same way as for other crowdfunded products: when the team decides that the money they get through sales is no longer allocated to developpment or when the product no longer sells (first option is the most usual)
SC plays no different scheme, it is your typical crowdfunded product, except maybe very successful.