Personally, its becoming increasingly obvious after Assassin's Creed Unity that AAA multiplayer games need to have beta's. I agree with BrokenGamezHD about this. In fact it we should have demos of the closest product we can get to the finished one for single player as well. As he said, its free work and future consumers could feel like they are apart of the development process and it doesnt come at a hiring cost for companies. This would to lead to a much better relationship between consumers and developers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSVovQgE-fs&list=UUvHtEkC1NPbdC7c1eCupsnQ

Well, look at the case with a lot of games like Assassins Creed. It leads to less deception for gamers feeling screwed out of a $60 game. Aliens Colonial maries could've used a beta as well. He also spoke about the fact that there needs to be some sort of advocacy for gamers because the amount of crap that has been coming out has been weird. 

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Game companies should just do more beta test internally & crucial, stop setting in stone release dates, say instead "we hope to release this game in this time frame but won't do so until the game works & is finished.".
Lauching games because it's X-mas, because A or B game is launching at this date is unacceptable!!! Games are prone to delays, there will always exist unforeseen factors that will influence game dev.
My advice, if you want to release a game around X-mas, work on it for Spring release, at least you have a 6 months buffer for whatever comes up, if all goes well, you have 6 months to do extra beta test & you can add extra polish & get it to the media in time for them to play & test it!

Well in the case of Halo it's not the actual games fault just the crap servers of MS. AC I just got in the mail today and I'll see what all the hoopla is about it. Unless it was already patched? Then you have CoD and it has the same issues as Halo, game works fine just the crap servers making the game unplayable.

Not really, I think beta's are, more or less like "demos" anyway and I do think they aren't very representative of the final product anyway because most of the time, you can be like, "oh, this is pretty flawed or this is glitchy but oh well, its a beta" so I don't think it should be mandatory.

What good are betas if the developer doesn't utilize it anyway?

Look at games like SOCOM 4 and Twisted Metal and #Driveclub, they all had betas/MP demos and absolutely nothing from them was put to use. Or MS games like any of the Gears. EA with Battlefield. Back when CoD had betas, they didn't change anything in the retail game.

One reason I am hyped for Evolve even more after the alpha. You can read their forums, and the developers are already discussing changes and balances and fixes.

The reason the games launch assy is because of time. Forcing a MP demo aka beta on them would do more harm than good.

Mandatory? Like a law? Congress has better things to do with their time.

If you mean just a common, expected industry practice, I think it would be a good idea, but developers will be the ones that ultimately are punished if gamers react accordingly.

Battlefield 3 and 4 both prove that betas don't do as much as they should. At this point, it's an early demo used for marketing rather than a true beta.

Or... consumers could stop buying broken games so devs have to make sure they work.