The (not so) stringent world of video game testing
by Kevin Kelly 
{ Jul 15th 2007 at 2:32PM }
Check out Karla's article in The Seattle Weekly and see how easy it is to pass a game through the QA process. It's not quite the same as the view of game testers that were presented in the Academy Award winning (we keed, we keed) film Grandma's Boy, but it's a great look from inside, and really illustrates the point that game testing is one of the weakest links in the game development chain. In fact, Darci Morales, a producer for game developer Surreal said, "What really sucks is that QA is always the first thing to go. Always."
However, if you've been thinking about getting a job as a tester in order to feed your gaming addiction, you'll be happy to know you'd be welcomed with open arms. Dr. Hilarie Cash of the Internet/Computer Addiction Services in Redmond says, "I think the [video game] industry in general, they want addicts. It is to their economic benefit to have people really hooked on their games. That there happens to be a pool of addicts out there who will work for peanuts, like methadone treatment, is to their advantage." Gaming being compared to a methadone treatment .. woot!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kevin @ May 19th 2009 3:02PM
I looked around a lot online to find out how to become a video game tester. Finally I got hired and am making money just to play games! I never thought it would happen, but luckily I found www.PaidToTest.com
J.Pickering83 @ May 20th 2009 10:13AM
Im a noobie in the game testing world , i live in ohio is it even possible to get a testing job in ohio?im signed up with only4gamers.com. and lastly where can i find an open beta testing? non paying is fine, i just want exp.
NATO_Duke @ Jul 15th 2007 2:36PM
Buddy of mine was a game tester in California for a major company and the pay was awful - $10 an hour. Yeah, you can live on that in southern cali...sure.
Glenn Stotz Jr. @ Jul 15th 2007 2:44PM
I am a "product specialist" for a production company in California. I work ten hours a week (more when there are oncoming deadlines). Not only do I test games for bugs, but I have creative input for gameplay, proofread manuals and strategy guides, take screenshots and video clips for media, and work on ESRB submissions with them.
I only get paid $10 an hour too. But I love every minute of it.
I think if you are strictly bug testing, $10 an hour is a great wage. Sure, you have to play the same levels of games over and over again, but we've all played World of Warcraft at some point, right? And you have to pay Blizzard to do that.
Shagittarius @ Jul 15th 2007 5:15PM
And you wonder why QA sucks? Cause they hire addicts and not professionals.
Guess what QA is a tough job, you need professional workers not kids and rejects that you can pay 10.00 an hour.
Trust me, just beacuse your playing games doesn't mean its any fun.
Tony @ Jul 15th 2007 2:50PM
Reading this, she mentions that she doesn't even work with the "functionality" deparment while she's there. I mean, if your job is to make sure something doesn't crash, that's your job. I don't know that it automatically means no one else is being concerned with whether or not the games (like DDR, as she mentions) actually work properly... wouldn't that fall into the section of testing she didn't even get to do?
That said, it was a very interesting article.
Dave @ Jul 15th 2007 3:05PM
Game testing is not taken seriously in the industry. Quality assurance is a serious profession--but game companies often hire non-professionals to do their testing. For non-gaming companies, QA professionals usually have computer science degrees and years of experience. Proper testing requires careful systematic study.
Steve @ Jul 15th 2007 3:18PM
This article plainly shows that if you get a job that requires no complex skills and looks alluring on the surface (playing video games all day!), expect it to be low-paying because they can always get someone else.
Granted, to do QA well, you DO need good analytical skills and a strong work ethic, but these companies don't seem to care whether you are good. They'd like the people who show up to be good, but they won't pay for good workers!
What a shitty deal. My next job will be boring, but at least it will pay well with benefits and only last 40 hours a week. I'd rather be bored and have time for my own gaming than have varying amounts of fun at work, but work all the time and never have time for my own gaming until I'm on a laid-off "vacation"!
pr_master @ Jul 15th 2007 3:31PM
wow, 8.25 an hour would be a wonderful
job for a 19-20 year old here in Puerto Rico
were the minimum wage is 5.15/H. You
could live with salary here in PR but playing video games for 8 hours every day is not cool.
whiny bitch @ Jul 15th 2007 3:46PM
Quality QA is a choice a company can make. Some companies have great QA, and you can tell when you play their games. Some companies have crap QA, and you can tell when their products get recalled-- or when you read about their shoddy operation in an article like this.
The QA described in this article is a huge disaster, but it's also not how good companies do it.
Anthony @ Jul 15th 2007 4:21PM
This is why companies have started doing public beta's. It allows them to get their QA for free.
Justin @ Jul 15th 2007 4:40PM
I worked for EA and Sega as a CQC and QA tester respectively, and even though I love gaming they were the worst jobs I ever had. EA paid us for a 8 hour day 5 days a week but expected us to work 12 hours a day with one weekend off in 4 and Sega was like a nazi concentration camp, I hated it there, it did not help that I had to play Sonic Heroes for 3 1/2 months, 8 hours a day only being allowed to move from my desk during regulation break times.
You cannot imagine how boring it is to test a crap game and then have to test it again on another hardware platform. It was also soul destroying because they never actually fixed the bugs, the dev studio would say that each and every bug we found was a "known shippable".
eubep @ Jul 15th 2007 4:40PM
Let's not forget, most of the time they have to play terrible games. Hundreds of new games every year and only few of them are any good. How many of us can complete various Barbie games?
Kristian Freeman @ Jul 15th 2007 5:18PM
This reminds me of when I took a Video Game programming class last year (Digipen sponsored) and they told us about how video game testing was a horrible job.. they gave us an example saying "Imagine playing Mario Kart 64 and having to run into every wall from every angle in every level to make sure there's no bugs. That's what video game testing is like." People must have to have a lot of patience to do that.
Shagittarius @ Jul 15th 2007 5:29PM
Thats not how good testing is done. Any professional tester will tell you that you can't test everything. The person who told you this had no experience at a real QA job.
k0sm0s @ Jul 15th 2007 5:32PM
reminds me when i was doing my student project (developing a simple game).. got so tired till the point when i saw a bug i just say to myself "nevermind they will let me off with this bug.."
Poisoned Al @ Jul 15th 2007 7:10PM
As a PC gamer, I've long since learned not to buy a game for a month or so. It's blatantly there's fuck all testing any more thanks to the internet for a number of reasons. From what I've heard from some friends inside a big publisher that I will not name (but it's an anagram of HQT), testers get a final gold press of a game A WEEK before it ships! Officially it's to prevent piracy, but I'm sure the cost effectiveness didn't pass their minds.
Now consoles have the internet, consoles owners now too can experience the joys of getting half finished games shat in their systems!
koston. @ Jul 19th 2007 5:01AM
That place could be run by robots, its not real QA testing. They don't debug or change code. They just say shit broke, ok reboot.
Seishino @ Jul 15th 2007 7:33PM
This does vary quite a bit, but the rule of thumb is:
Remote QA is arse. You're never part of the team, the bugs are never fixed, no communication can happen.
Local QA is usually great. You're part of the team, you talk directly to the developers, you know what's going on and they know what you're doing.
Which is not to say that endemic problems don't exist. I've had to turn down QA positions because they simply didn't pay enough for transportation costs, let alone living ones. And I've definitely been down the road of "thank you for working 80 hour weeks for 4 months. You're all fired."
But done well, QA can be a great position. In many ways, it is both a hazing and an education. If you're serious enough about gaming to be a QA tester for any length of time, you're serious enough to be in the industry. And, while you're doing that 7-dollar-an-hour work, you should be figuring out how games come together in a way that they just don't teach you in school. Some companies treat their QA like second-class citizens, but a lot of them are waking up the the fact that they are productive members of the team and can be milked for even more value if you treat them as such.
BTW, the reason why a game is "in development" is because it isn't fun yet. Hence, for 90% of the time you're testing the game, it's not actually fun yet. The fun of testing a game comes from trying to be crafty and break it. Pile up 50 trampolines on top of eachother and jump. Set up a 10 second bomb in a room before a 15 second cut scene. Throw a long-distance three pointer after the buzzer, and foul the referee before it sinks. If that sort of meticulous picking-apart of a game doesn't sound like fun, then you're probably looking at the wrong career.
Vexorg @ Jul 15th 2007 8:17PM
I have several years worth of experience in software testing (not on games though, I'm not sure I'd ever want to do it) and it's definitely not a job for everyone. Back when I started in testing, pretty much anyone with basic computer skills and the ability to follow instructions could get themselves into software testing, at least at the entry level. This is no longer the case though. Where I currently work, they now want their testers to have programming skills (not to fix the bugs you find, but primarily to be able to write test tools and automation.) They also expect you to be able to take something, look at it, and be able to figure out what test cases would be needed, and write those test cases so that someone with no knowledge of the product would be able to run them (which is harder than it looks, especially when you have to dig deep down into the product and test framework.)
There is also a lot of drudgery involved, no matter what you're working on. This is especially true if you're working on something that needs to be compatible with multiple platforms, of if you're too busy trying to get something working well enough to be able to actually test it (there's a distinct difference between "buggy" and "broken".) On every product I've ever worked on, there's also been a lot of bureaucracy to deal with (at the late stages of a product cycle, fully 95% of the stuff you file bugs on will probably get sent back as "won't fix" or postponed to the next version. There is a reason for this (if they decided to fix everything that gets bugs filed for it, they'd never get the product shipped) but it can be frustrating at times.
I'm not trying to dissuade people from getting into software testing (my current job pays much more than the game testing grunt jobs discussed here) but it's something of an acquired taste. It can be a good way to get a decent job in software if you haven't quite got the mind for working in software development though.
MyName @ Jul 15th 2007 10:09PM
I work in QA as a compliance / pre cert specialist.
I worked a 15 hour shift Friday and worked all weekend.
I'm underpaid.
Hurray for QA.
Negativecool @ Jul 16th 2007 1:07AM
Where the hell can I game test in the midwest?---Again, living in the midwest sucks!...dammit!
When will I get to say (a touch cross-eyed) "I just finished level 3 and you need to tighten up the graphics a little bit."
Brian @ Jul 16th 2007 2:22AM
I put all the testing stations together at the VMC offices described in the Seattle weekly article a few years ago. Some prick tester there stole my hamburger out the microwave, I call him the hamburgler.
Ralod @ Jul 16th 2007 3:34AM
Thats rough. Damn that hamburgler.
Back a few years ago I worked as a QA tester for a major PC video card developer. If you think testing games is boring, you should try testing the same games over and over after each new driver build, just looking for artifacts and video lag :) And yes, there are more builds then what goes public. It did pay decently however, but it was not unskilled labor either.
The company I worked for went out of business(not hard to guess), and I think most of the Video card makers nowadays just do unpaid testing over the Internet, but I am not 100% sure on that.
DarkTetsuya @ Jul 16th 2007 3:45AM
My cousin used to do this for a living, he even got the chance to show me around his work, and I sat and watched him do his thing... Didn't seem like anything *too* difficult for someone like me. (Mainly play-testing the game and going between it and the computer to type up stuff, and so on.)
fabest @ Jul 16th 2007 9:15AM
Q&A isn't like that everywhere. I did it in France for 2 years and it was taken very seriously as it is important for a game to pass the manufacturers' tests quite quickly (especially because it costs money if you fail more than two times, and your game will be delayed).
The tests are not easy to pass and you must do a very accurate and thoughtful work to achieve them.
Besides we hired people who love games of course but we chose the most open minded, cultivated and friendly ;) of them.
And Magic The Gathering is by no means an RPG, dear lady who wrote the article. It is a card game.
Ghen @ Jul 16th 2007 7:42AM
Am I the only one wondering why this kid plays with the computer's hot air blowing directly on him?
DrXym @ Jul 16th 2007 7:52AM
I don't know why anyone would want to be a tester. At least most companies have a proper QA lab with a career path and benefits. But this article made it sounds like these QA testers were simply hired monkeys. It's actually disturbing that MS does outsource this stuff since it does not inspire confidence that they are testing properly at all.
The fact of the matter is that QA is boring but by its nature it has to be. You have to have a test plan and then methodically run a product through the test plan to see what works and what doesn't. The test plan has to be stringent and cover everything. People who think they're going to just be able to play any game they like will be in for a rude shock. You will be playing the game being tested whether its Barbie Horse Adventures or some other POS, and then you'll be testing against the test plan. If the test plan says the menus & options require 2 days of testing, you'll be in the menus and options for two days ticking boxes after testing each action. If the test plan says level X needs testing, you will be playing that damned level until it is tested no matter how boring it is.
People have to realise that QA is a job. There is a temperament required to do the same repetition over and over again. If you think you can just play some cool games then think again.
jm @ Jul 16th 2007 3:21PM
I love video games, but there is no way I could do this. I doubt anyone actually enjoys "playing" a game for such a long period of time specifically looking for bugs or what-have-you. Because, like some have said already, this is a job, period.
And jobs are not supposed to be fun.