spined

I used to work at a company that did tech support for gaming companies and they had a spate testing department. That departmnet had this comic posted up all over the place after it was published. It was set in the most dark, mysterious, and low light areas of the building.

If you have read Penny Arcade’s other comic The Trenches it also paints the sort of life a tester lives, though that comic is no longer updating. It also has post with real life testimonials from game testers.

Game development is in fact a “how the sausage is made” scenario. In big game development organization, game developers will have to go through from harsh working conditions, long hours, expected “crunch” periods where people will work more than 100 hour per weeks or more when nearing release, often abuse from top management, and volatile unbearable workplaces as not only are they not sure they will have a job after the game publish but they are in doubt if the company will exist after the game release or go out of business/be bought 3 months down the line. This is of course without union protection and required Non-Disclosure agreements that are so Draconian that a mere whisper to the wrong person could mean immediate dismissal and even potentially being sued. Good luck trying to chat about your day with any person.

Now, take all those problems, and the tester not only has to live with ALL of those problems, but ends up working extremely redundant work (run down the hall 1000 times until you clip through the floor and then do a report on it!), work that has no creativity, a good chance you won’t even be listed in the game credits, SIGNIFICANTLY worse pay and possibly benefits to the point of being paid worse than retail sometimes, and the utter dismissal and often disdain from game devs who won’t listen or won’t care about certain bugs.

I had somebody tell me that a game developer sent a reply to a bug report that was literally, VERBATIM: “Honey Badger doesn’t give a shit.”

That was certainly a good natured joke, but that sort of attitude is pervasive in game developers who think that game testers are just random dude they picked up off the street.

It IS true that you need zero credentials to be a game tester other than a pulse, but most of people who do work on them are really hard workers who do care about their work ethic and integrity.

Game testing is possibly the worst job to have in gaming industry. There is a higher chance you wont even work in the same building as the game developers and may not even work for the same company, and on top of that you can bet that when the game ships and there are bugs out the wazoo that the game testers found, logged, and pointed out in excruciating detail, the people on social media and forums will be screaming at the game testers for not doing their job.

tl;dr: Long hours, boring and redundant job, stressful environment, very low pay, zero job security, potential abuse from management and developers, can’t talk about it without being fired and/or sued, often unpaid overtime and crunch periods, none of the credit, all of the blame, and a 90% chance you aren’t working on a game you would want to play anyway.