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Is Bughunting Still A Way Into the Games Industry?
Edge Online is reprinting an article from last month's issue of the British gaming magazine. In the article, Bug Hunt, they look at the role of the modern QA tester. While once a good way to make yourself known to the company's HR staff, it's more and more simply a summer gig between classes for college students. They also discuss the hard working conditions, soul-crushing scheduling, and the public misconception that what a QA tester does involves the word 'play'. From the article: "Anyone with any experience of the QA process will deny the slightest resemblance between testing a game and playing one for pleasure: finding bugs is unmistakably work, and, by common consensus, very dull and repetitive work at that. On top of this, pay is often poor, job security frail, working conditions extreme and recognition hard to come by. So why do it?"
I'd say that there's a better chance to get into the industry if you're a damn good modder, rather than a damn good bug finder.
Counterstrike(HL), Desert Combat(BF42), and Red Orchesta(UT2004) are all examples of this.
... so long as there are thousands and thousands of "kids" out there who dream of playing video games for a living. It doesn't matter that the reality is nothing like the fantasy. One kid gets burnt out and leaves, ten more beg to take his place.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
QA will not be a path to anything but a series of contractor jobs in the majority of the game industry for a number of reasons.
First and foremost is the general value the software culture puts on QA to begin with. In any software environment, QA is frequently looked down upon, or at the very least not seen in the same light of respect and value that development is. This makes the QA position something that can be seen as nonessential to the primary function of the company: writing software.
Obviously, that's incorrect, and anyone who has actually worked with a good QA team will tell you so. Trouble is, there are plenty of bad QA teams, and badly managed projects where the value of QA is not clearly laid out.
In the game industry in general, you have the problems as already laid out: soul crushing work hours, ludicrous release schedules, and a sense that there is always someone waiting to do your job because it's a 'dream job' in the game industry. But that applies for every single game developer too. Or have people so quickly forgotten the EA scandal & lawsuit about the lives of their programmers?
Because most development houses are not their own publisher, they have external dependencies and requirements for quality that they must meet. Someone publishing a game thru Vivendi will hand it off to VU for an acceptance pass based on whatever criteria vivendi have in mind. Publisher's QA groups are probably the worst to work for and offer the least amount of actual outside visibility for the tester, but that's where the jobs are. The majority of QA jobs in studios are going to be reserved for people who have inside contacts or are lifetime career testers that are not trying to 'get into the game industry through qa'. They're in those positions because they're excellent testers who can help the company reach the publisher milestones. In some companies, there isn't even a QA team. The logic goes that the publisher will tell you when your game is good enough to release, and you can always bring in contractors on a temporary basis if you need to.
The real answer as to how to break into the game industry isn't a certificate from Game Design University Of DeVry Technical ITT College, and it isn't trying to get 'any job you can in the industry'. The real answer is to develop people skills. More than any industry I've worked in, the games industry runs on word of mouth and personal references. If someone knows you, you are vastly more likely to be hired than the person with superior skills on paper who doesn't have a personal recommendation.
QA never was the only way in, and it still isn't the only way in. In my experience, though, it helps a lot.
What you learn in technical school won't give you real experience with game development. There are a million things it won't teach you. They don't teach you when to leave something broken "for now." They don't teach you the utility of having everyone in your company observe focus tests. They don't teach you that sometimes the best design of one thing has to lose so that another feature which is important can survive. And, of course, a million other details about game development from when it is okay to telecommute an artist into a meeting to how
And, sadly, from what little I've seen they really don't let you get into the minutae of a game. Like when you push a button, does the button trigger on button down or button up? Does the animate-off occur after the button-down or during? Should the animate off take two seconds or one.
QA gets you exposure to all of that. You come out of a (in-house) QA gig basically knowing how to make a game. If you later come back as an artist, you're suddenly a more valuable candidate because you don't have to be told everything. You know the art resource is going to change a couple of times, so as not to polish too much for stand-in stuff. You know which parts of direction are essential to follow and which parts are suggestions. You know to keep an eye on milestones, and always buffer in an extra bug-fixing day or two before one.
Given the option between spending a year as QA and spending a year as a Programmer on a game, be a programmer. If you're going to be an artist, be an artist. But if you're still in college, or didn't graduate from MIT, get in through QA. It looks great on your resume to say that you spent a summer working along side a real team of developers, proving that you're not some random fuckup who is going to burn out in four weeks.
Of course, this is all QA for small companies that have their own QA staff. Don't work remotely at a publisher if you can avoid it. You won't learn much there.
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Seriously, a good tester is worth his weight in gold.