I don't think there's anything wrong with adding it as an incentive to purchase other products, especially if it's a sort of promotional product or special sale like with Champions. But I'd find it reprehensible if developers started selling Beta access on its own.
I've half-expected Blizzard to go this route with the StarCraft II Beta ever since their parent company merged with Activision.

Most players in Betas don't submit bug reports or do anything other than play the game like normal. Closed Betas usually only allow in people that the company trusts to be helpful, so for games that have a rabid fanbase, that fanbase will pay to just drool over the product, so giving it away as part of a promotion for another game is smart business. Remember that rabid fans that are willing to spend money on a totally different game are very much likely to actually test and report bugs in the target game.

They probably at first wanted to give access to everyone that started a subscription, but had to limit the numbers, so pushed it to the 6-month version instead.

Kuliani:
Most players in Betas don't submit bug reports or do anything other than play the game like normal. Closed Betas usually only allow in people that the company trusts to be helpful, so for games that have a rabid fanbase, that fanbase will pay to just drool over the product, so giving it away as part of a promotion for another game is smart business. Remember that rabid fans that are willing to spend money on a totally different game are very much likely to actually test and report bugs in the target game.

They probably at first wanted to give access to everyone that started a subscription, but had to limit the numbers, so pushed it to the 6-month version instead.

Well to be totally honest I think a lot of the problem here is with the companies not taking their testers seriously. I think the problem is that THEY treat people invited from the general populance as freeloaders/previewers, and ignore the entire player base except for a handfull of people they recruit for the purpose.

The reason I say this is because I'm reasonably good at breaking games, and I have done a LOT of betas. In perhaps the last 5 or 6 years I've noticed that the designers tend to totally ignore their beta testers. By this I mean I will find an error in the game, such as a paticular area in "Auto Assault" where you could get your car perma-stuck due to a wierdly shapred pit inside of an instance. It was in one of the first instances/dungeons. I mentioned this fairly early on in Beta. When they game was finally released, they totally rid-did the tutorial (for reasons I won't go into) but didn't fill in that pit. I kind of gave up in disgust. It's one of the more notable experiences I've had.

In general the more the developers treat "beta givaways" as some kind of promotional gimmick than as testing, the more likely I am to treat them as free play time. Age Of Conan, Warhammer Online, Dungeon Runners, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Earth and Beyond, Champions Online... all games I betaed where they didn't seem to care, and what's more half the time with betas it seems like your whining for your free promotional playtime, than getting in to test anything.

As far as STO goes, I'm interested in seeing it due to the promise of having both ground based and ship based engines/content, which is something I've felt we needed to see more of for a long time. Especially if the ship based segements are RPG-like (EVE, Earth and Beyond), as opposed to some lame shooter like the old "Star Wars Galaxies" version.

I'm more excited about Star Wars Online, but I guess since it came with Champions (which I got because I'm a super hero junkie) I do want to see it. I have little faith though that they will remotely care what I have to say about the beta. I still sent like 30 E-mails and half a dozen message board posts for Champions despite having less time for the beta than usual/I expected for RL reason.

I guess my point here is, that you shouldn't be pointing fingers at the testers and saying "well, your a bunch of freeloaders who just play as opposed to test". If anything that attitude has been created by the staff.

Of course then again I do seem to be the "touch of death" for some of these games, I beta for them, share input, and then they game either dies or becomes relatively obscure/unsuccesful. Of course then again with some games like Age Of Conan, the whole thing was based on so many lies and deceptions (at least towards the end) that I doubt they cared about the input of their user base.

In some cases I *DO* understand that a game can't overcome fundemental design flaws (as a beta tester your not there to criticize content specifically). For example I sort of predicted what was going to happen with WAR early on. One of the earliest signs/problems was how much attention they put into the "bad" guys compared to the "good" guys along with how much of the player base was screaming "evil, evil, evil", which you could even see in the "Road to War" game where the sides were not even close. This lead to "Alliance Syndrome" (rolling Alliance in World Of Warcraft known as one of the biggest jips in gaming, even by strips like Penny Arcade), a LOT of frustration, and by the time they decided to do things like add a *fairly* overpowered tank-class to Order, the game had already suffered tremendous damage and wound up being a lot less successful than it could have been. Not it's ONLY issue for sure, but one of the biggest ones... and something a lot of Beta Testers saw coming.

Right now I look at "Knights Of The Old Republic" and while looking forward to it, see the same thing happening. Trailers full of Sith pwning Jedi, ultra-cool bounty hunters, rather "meh" looking good guys (Soldiers, Smugglers)... message forums full of "Sith, Sith, Sith! Bounty Hunters!, Bounty Hunters!, Bounty Hunters!". You don't have to be a beta tester to see this one rapidly going in the direction of another Horde/Destruction type domination both in player base size, and time/attention to detail & development.

Enough rambling, the point is... blame the industry, not the testers. The attitude of testers has largely turned out this way because of the industry.