Or let me tell you about a little game developing company:
Back in the day, I used to play a lot of Half-Life, then the mods came around and there was Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Sven-COOP, Day of Defeat etc. Then came NS or Natural Selection. This game immediately became very popular because it combined Real Time Strategy with First Person Shooter type gameplay. One team was Marines, the other Aliens and each map had resource-nodes and various rooms that aliens could build more hives in. In 2001, a certain game developer that used to work on projects such as the RTS game Empire Earth, left the company and started off a new company. It struggled with the few donations from the Half-Life mod NS, because they can't charge players for a mod to a game made by another company.
So after developing the game and trying to build his company he finally finished building his very own game, namely NS2, in his own engine called "Spark" and he was in a financial crisis so he thought : "Let's offer the fans a game engine-demo to show what the game will look and feel like and let them have 1 gun to shoot target dummies around a single map, then charge a few bucks for it". The fans bought this and his company immediately earned like several ten thousands of dollars on it, motivating him and helping him continue developement and move into a new office/hire programmers.
After this it's all been downhill and they did the smart thing: They made a beta-version that costs the amount of the full game and gives fans and newcomers the ability to test, play and report bugs. They even incorporated the bug-reporting system into the game engine so that if you hit "F1" you are brought to the bug-reporting URL in your web-browser and you can immediately report it. They use this program :
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/. What it does is it allows easy collection of loads of bugs and/or requests by the community/customers to allow quicker fault adressing, isolation and repair.
What it does it let the developers accept or reject bugs and/or requests and keeps track of it. Then it's possible to make a new "build" or patch out of these requests and bugs and share them within the developing team. After faults have been confirmed fixed, one can rule it out and call it "delivered" and all of this can, to the community's joy, be uploaded live to a website. So the community can see what's currently being worked on and monitor progress, access the complete list of bugs, add your own bugs, add requests and comment on everything to help the devs figure out what's causing the bugs.
I would highly recommend that the devs use a system like this. I would actually be surprised if they didn't.
Oh and if you wonder what the game looks like you can check out their site
www.unknownworlds.com/ns2