Life as a Game Tester

Michael Elliott

Welcome to QA, the food trough comes by at noon.

There exists an idle thought in game culture that being a games tester is an easy foot in the door into the video game industry, that it is a gamer’s dream job.  This thought can go on to posit that if you get to be part of quality assurance, all you have to do is keep your head down, pay your dues, and in a few years you’ll be doing… well, anything other than QA, really.  Games designer, producer, some kind of team lead; all of these lay illuminated at the end of this path, or at least, that’s a perception that exists.  Sites like The Trenches and Extra Credits have done much to try to combat this thought, and expose it for the myth that it is.  But with loud voices like 3 seasons of Sony’s The Tester, a reality show that makes a QA position at Sony seem like the chance of a life time, it can get hard to discern what life as a game’s tester is really like.

When I’m not being a terribly unprolific writer, I work a 9-5 job for a very large games company. I have been part of QA for the last year, and I feel like I could shed some light on what it is like to be a game tester, what you can expect if you want to get into it, and most importantly, what it certainly is not.

Getting Started

I got started as a game tester through a combination of dumb luck and tenacity.  I had decided, after arriving home from my first Penny Arcade Expo in 2009, that I wanted to become part of the video game industry. I wanted to be part of creating these games that I loved, to be responsible for part of the amazing experience that is PAX.  So, wide-eyed and full of enthusiasm, I quit my soul destroying, relatively well-paying, and steady retail job, and set off towards the glorious games businesses of Vancouver, BC.

2 years later, I was still searching. I had applied to almost every job opening at every studio in the city, sending in CVs for QA positions, or anything else I thought I could do.  Eventually, I had to take more soul-sucking jobs to pay my bills.  But on my way to PAX in 2011, I got the call, and I started just after I came back from Seattle.

This is your first lesson: a games tester for the most part is an entry level position, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to get.  Like any job it will help to have some skills and experience in the field, and with games testing, “totally a huge gamer 4 life” may be a handy skill, but it is far from a safe bet.  From what I’ve seen, seeing the other side of the hiring process, it can help to show that in addition to your obvious love of games, that you are also passionate about games.  There are several free tools out there that will help you put together your own game, and that can go a long way in showing you’re a cut above the typical fan that walks in the door expecting a testing job.

The Job

So, assuming you stick with it, and after a few promising interviews that you never hear back from, you finally get the call and show up bright and early on Monday morning on that first glorious day.  What can you expect?  Honestly, this depends on the nature of the game.  If you’re part of a large AAA title, you may be expected to test a very specific portion of the game: a certain level, a certian game mechanic, the game’s cinematics, or you might even just create saved games all day.  Smaller projects might have you be a tester of all trades, looking at all parts of the game over the course of a few days.

Welcome to the office, Dave. I’m already broken.

One thing is for certain:  whatever you’ll be testing, you’ll be doing it all day, every day.  QA can be just as boring and soul-draining as your typical retail job. The first few weeks will probably be awesome as you are basically being paid to play a game all day.  But eventually, the reality of the situation sets in: you are playing a game that breaks pretty much all the time, meaning you may have to spend hours sitting around and waiting for something to do.  You probably aren’t being paid very much, and since QA positions are usually contract jobs, you don’t get any benefits and probably not a lot of perks.  Even if you are testing a game that you love, and a certain part of that game that you love playing, at the end of the day you have a 9-5 office job, and eventually it will start to feel like one.  Eventually, the high ends, and so too will the job.

The End

The company I work for treats testers well.  Actually, that’s a terrible oversimplification.  It’s never as simple as “this company is horrible to testers,” or “this company integrates QA into the team really well.”  The horror stories you’ve heard about mass layoffs and terrible conditions are true, and until a few years ago were even true of the company I work for.  But much of how your job will fair is up to your managers and team leads, and their actions are not necessarily representative of the company as a whole, nor are the business decisions of the company you work for, or more likely contractually tied to, delineative of how your managers will act.  It’s more about the people you work with, and how capable they are at their jobs.

Typically, when a project ends, the QA team will be either laid off or relocated to other projects within the company. Whether or not you will be kept around will depend a lot on you, your work performance, your personality, your living situation, the needs of the company, and the limits of the budget.  If you do good work and have received positive feedback you could be kept on and cycled through other projects, or you may just get put on the top of the pile of resumes for the next time they need QA support.  The reality is that this could be a very brief gig, so try to plan accordingly.  

But if you manage to keep your job, be prepared for more of the same, or something even completely different.  If you started testing the game of your dreams, you may end up testing a game designed for a demographic you tended to avoid in high school, or some software barely reminiscent of a game.  You may notice that you haven’t been promoted to games designer yet, or producer, or team lead, or even got anything other than some slightly inflated paychecks for the last few weeks of twelve hour days.  This is the great lesson of being a games tester that I have learned: QA isn’t a way to get a different job in the games industry that you might prefer, it’s a way to get a job in QA.

It’s not too late…

It is completely possible that you could wind up in a different field. I have met people who started in QA who are now developers and directors.  But what that requires is networking, courses in art, games design, or project management, lots of long hours, and like I said in the very beginning: a passion for games.  Lots of us love games, but there’s a difference between playing video games as your favourite hobby, and dedicating often more than 40 hours a week to help make a game in one of the simplest and thankless positions in the industry.  

I’ve been a games tester for a year now, and I love my job, but it’s still a job, and sometimes I forget that I basically get to play with games for a living. I don’t play nearly as many games as I used to. When that’s all that you do for 8 hours a day, you start to look for other hobbies and escapes when you get home at the end of the day.  It’s just a job, and like everything else in life you want to try to make sure you’re doing it because you genuinely want to, and not for the sake of some overhyped myth.