Quality Assurance In The Games Industry

Thanks to NTSC-uk for their opinion piece discussing the perceived lack of 'quality assurance' in the videogame industry. Amid oft-repeated claims that "many games fall short of the mark" on overall quality, there are some more interesting arguments that QA testing "rarely promotes the criticism and fine-tuning of the most important aspect of design - gameplay." The author even goes on to suggest that hardware manufacturers should again get more involved in the quality of games on their machine: "Nintendo demonstrated during the 80s and early 90s how the power of the manufacturer can be used... to ensure that the design of new games, and particularly good gameplay, was top of the agenda - hence Nintendo's 'Seal of Quality'."

Comments

Good QA is undervalued

[codemonkey_uk]

IMHO high quality QA is hugely undervalued in the games industry as a whole. To many publishers just take on any old kids on their summer/winter vacation from collage, just for the final project phase, and do not see the hiring of quality staff in the QA department as a long term investment. Less than games half the companies I've encountered (ie worked for or interviewed at) take QA a seriously as I think they should.

Anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much, but it can be entertaining, so here is a the "description" from a genuine bug report from a major US publisher, for a game I was working on a while back (not published):

"-Music selection should very , as well as sound efects
crashing ,sliding out , aswell as a annoncer threw the
game making itmore real , funnny , and with the race
atall times, when a accident acures, ect."

This was submitted as a "class A", "In-Game GUI" bug.

It's a cut and paste. No typos introduced in the retelling.