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Working as a Game Tester
DaytonCIM writes "SFGate.com has a great story on the real life of game testers. 'Life is not all fun and games, though. It's all games -- with little time left for sleeping or eating, at least during the busy months before Christmas. The longest week he has logged was 106 hours, and 60-hour-plus weeks are typical in deadline crunches, he said.'"
back at my old job, the floor beneath ours was owned by EA's Tiburon division, and they hired gametesters seasonally to playtest whatever the next thing was. when i was working there, it was just before the PS2 launched in the US, and they were all playtesting Madden. It was funny, cuz when they first started the job we all envied the crap out of them. But after about 8 months of nothing but 50hr+ weeks of nothing but Madden, you'd talk to these guys and they'd sound like they'd never pick up a videogame again. =)
Do yourself a favor and test API's or server backends, its not glamorous but you won't go crazy.
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Game testing is very mundane.. I'm near Lucasoft in the Bay Area, and I've heard from a few testers that:
1) You are hardly EVER hired on full time (always a temp, which means no benifits)
2) You're jobs are things like "Click every single one of these buttons in the menu and tell us if anything crashes"
3) You're usually laid off at the end of your temp position
4) Very long hours (especially considering the kind of work you're doing).
I'd rather work in an assembly line, myself...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
So which is worse, playing the same game over and over for two months or staring at the same piece of crap ASP code and trying to figure out what the 30 developers in front of you were thinking (or not as the case may be) while your boss is screaming about deadlines, the financial people are screaming about budgets, and your co-workers are screaming about forming a union? Now ask yourself, which would you rather do: Test games, or be unemployed and "test games" without pay?
I went from being a mail boy at a very well known, smallish publisher to the QA lead at another publisher.
It WAS hellish. It was so corporate, I had to be at work by 9am, and they expected me to work until 8-10pm. Sometimes later, they ordered pizza around 5pm for the whole company. And everyone was salaried so they were expected to stick around. I had 9 fucking games on my plate.
Sure, you may think 9! great! but some of the games were HUGE and in bad shape. You may think the job is "playing games all day" But I actually playing games took about none of my time. About 90% of it was getting new builds from the development guys, making installation CDs, and then installing them and finally getting the game up and running to find that:
The menu bug is still there, needs to be fixed, the characters lip synching is still off, the game still crashes if you pick Paladin as your main character, etc etc etc. This isn't "playing games." It's going through a checklist of known bugs and making sure they're fixed/not fixed.
It sucks, it totally burns you out on games. I'd come home, and stare at my monitor, not wanting to play any games since I just spent 12 hours at work messing with them. I got burnt out in about a year and quit right before our game was about to go Gold. Then they threatened to sue me. I hope the company goes under, if it already hasn't.
Anonymous cuz I don't want to get more lawsuit threats.
or maybe it's just the company, I did QA for br0derbund back in the late 80's early 90's, and while it wasn't as bad as the article, it wasn't a cakewalk by a long means. Since then I've done QA for Autodesk, telecommunications equipment, healthcare software and now I'm testing web apps for an insurance company. Of all those the healthcare company was the most laid back and easy. (and yes we had quake deathmatch tournaments after hours on the comany net). At br0derbund, I had no intention on playing any more games after work...
No, this isn't a comic strip but it is the Penny-arcade 'guy' explaining his life as a video game developer. It's basically a rant, but it's a first hand experience from the tester himself. I now have respect for people who play video games all day and it's written very well.
Here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/porktester.php3
me again
Some more information:
I was salaried at $21,000 a year + health insurance. I had 1.5 days of time off per month. I was expected to come in on weekends during crunch time (which lasted 6 weeks), so I ended up working 80-90 hour weeks for no additional pay.
Yeah ok, I got free soda and pizza. Big whoop. It still sucked. I did get to go to E3 for free though, which was cool.
I worked for an employer that found that a lot of us had worked overtime and now needed to be paid. Rather than pay straight time-and-a-half, they empolyer offered a complicated formula that offered less and less money for each hour worked after 40 per week. They were thinking that we were less productive after 40 hours, and thus were worth more (personally, after 40 hours, my time becomes more valuable, regardless of my productivity). Anyway, we reduced their math to a simple parabolic equation and found that the peak was at 80 hours/week. If you worked 81 hours, you'd get paid less than if you worked 80. We had had a crunch time (in satellites, it's called "space chicken" where the rocket people and the payload people both bluff saying that they'll meet the deadline, hoping to put blame on the other), and, sure enough, we had people sleeping over and working > 100 hours/week. The company never though anyone would ever do that!
Unfortuantly, it seems that the laws of supply & demand don't help here and depresses game testers' salaries. I wonder what their overtime-pay situation is; it doesn't look too good.
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Just on that note, i know its a bit off topic, but i had that feeling while playing through Serious Sam. I am a very good FPS player, and I had serious sam on hard, and was awed at the graphics (couple years ago) and was having a lot of fun playing it through.
Well I let my Dad play through it, and he told me he beat it in an afternoon or so.
and i hadnt beat it yet (i let him borrow it) and he showed me some of the later stuff (to show off his puter) and I was like "how the hell you get here so fast" then i noticed he was in "tourist" mode, and i couldnt even play the damn thing after that.
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Having worked as a game tester for Crystal Dynamics, I can tell you that I would NEVER work as a game tester again. This isn't because the company I worked for sucked. Crystal was a great company to work for (Free lunch, casual work atmosphere, cool co-workers, LAN parties after work). It was because testing bugs over and over and over and over and over again is the most mind numbing work I have ever done in my life. I suppose if you worked on an assembly line it might be worse, but the work is very similar. Repetition is the name of the game in Game Testing. I'm very happy to be a Systems Administrator now. I have no problems listening to users whine about their computers not working. At least the problems vary from day to day. I remember having to test the same bug 10 times each before writing it up (this sometimes took up to an hour to get through the game to the point where the bug occurs), then getting a new burn of the game only to have to do it again. See how long you can take that. Oh, and many game testers work under contract for one project rather than full time, so that 40K a year salary is NOT something you can always depend on.
"You know Myra, some people might think you're cute. But me, I think you're one very large baked potato."
Hell, I remember being a beta tester for a game (Total Distortion), because my friend's cousin's husband was one of the lead designers. It was cool for a little while, but I was under no pressure to keep playing. If I'd had to put in 8 hours a day for a month trying to find bugs and the like, I'm sure I would have gone insane. The cute things like the "you are dead" song when you died would have gone from funny to annoying, and it ran pretty slowly on the machine I had back then. It really wasn't that great of a game (which is too bad, because his earlier game, Spaceship Warlock, ROCKED when it first came out).
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Dude...I was the highest paid for a while at my company...I topped out at $26,800 for the year...this is in Orange County.
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One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that game programmers work the same ( if not more ) hours than the testers and their job is even more demanding than "push all these buttons and see if it crashes"...they actually have to remain sharp-witted and able to debug with next to no sleep.
And comparing game testing to playing for 60 hours a week is "apples and oranges". I don't think you'd play a game with rampant bugs for 60 hours period...much less in a week.
It's more likely the producers/managers/execs did a poor job, by deciding to release the product before it was ready:
either they knew it was buggy & incomplete, and decided to ship it anyway, rather than slip the schedule;
or, they didn't know, in which case they are clueless idiots who clearly aren't capable of doing what their main job function is.
granted, it's certainly possible that engineering & qa may have done poor jobs, but that's no excuse for shipping a poor product, just to make the arbitrary deadline.
Some companies are indeed different, and it seems to be that the smaller the game development company, the better the product.
Case in point: My wife is nuts for Spyro the Dragon (PS) and Ratchet and Clank (PS2), both from a little company called Insomniac Games. After watching her play these games, I tried them myself and got hooked. Man, these games are solid. After mastering them, I started playing games specifically to do the weirdest shit I can possibly think of on them. I found a few bugs to be sure, but very minor ones, the kind that simply make something odd-looking happen and let the game continue without crashing or making the game unsolvable. Also, the playability of these games is great.
Now compare this to my wife's experience with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for the PS2 from Electronic Arts, or as I like to call it, Harry Potter and the Endless "Loading" Messages. Not only did the constant loading from disk wreck some of the continunity, it locked up several times during disk loads. Electronic Arts is a much bigger company than Insomniac Games, you would think they would have more money for QA testing, but the smaller company beats them out on that score.
This is, of course, just one example, and YMMV. I remember Electronic Arts came out with some real kickass games for the C64 years ago (but they were a smaller company back then ... hmmm)
Now pardon me while I go back to Ratchet and Clank and try to do even weirder shit on it ...
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