“We just finished level three and need to tighten up the graphics a little bit,” says considered one of them. He turns to his pal, smiling like he simply gained the lottery. “Hey, I can’t believe we got jobs doing this.” “I know,” the opposite man says. “And my mom said I would never get anywhere with these games.”
For a long time, that is how folks have imagined the lifetime of a online game tester, now not as 9-to-5 process yet because the fable of youngsters in all places. Who would not need to take a seat on a relaxed sofa and play video games all day, taking the occasional wreck to tighten up the graphics on point 3?
Fact is a little bit other. Online game high quality assurance (QA), as trying out is known as, is incessantly perceived as “playing games for a living” yet may higher be described as breaking them. It is a low-paying, every so often rewarding, incessantly irritating process that has each extra and no more to do with the standard of as of late’s video games than it’s possible you’ll be expecting.
A certified QA tester does not simply take a seat through the tv, crack a Mountain Dew, and saunter thru point 5 of the newest shooter; she or he spends 14 directly hours working into other partitions to look if they are all forged. Right kind video-game trying out is extra comparable to summary puzzle-solving than it’s to getting a most sensible ranking in Donkey Kong, regardless of what you could have noticed in school ads like Westwood’s. “It takes a very specific attitude and outlook to really be good in the QA world,” a veteran recreation tester informed me. “It goes beyond a passion for video games, and definitely beyond the notion that you get to play video games for a living.”
Recreation testers are, through nature, underappreciated; they’re simplest spotted when one thing is going mistaken. QA veterans say the process is anxious, tedious, and incessantly noticed as a doorway to different portions of recreation construction reasonably than a viable profession trail. Steadily, testers paintings on transient contracts or for outsourcing firms that do not allow them to keep up a correspondence immediately with a recreation’s builders. And when a recreation is especially buggy or broken—as many fresh releases have been—it’s normal for observers responsible QA. They’re the safeguards, after all—the ultimate wall between a programmer’s errors and a buyer’s cash. It is within the title: High quality Assurance. They are meant to guarantee high quality.
But if a large recreation ships damaged, is QA truly responsible? How may just testers most likely now not to find one of the vital insects that display up within the video games we play? Why do such a lot of servers wreck at all times? Simply what do QA folks do all day, anyway?
During the last few months I have had intensive conversations with a number of dozen present and previous QA testers—many of whom spoke anonymously so as to offer protection to their careers—in an try to discover the sector of online game trying out and take a look at to provide an explanation for what it is truly love to play video games for a residing. Some stated they hated operating in QA; others stated they could not believe doing anything. Virtually all agreed on something: now not a large number of folks know the way QA in fact works.
For so long as there were video video games, there were insects. Some are somewhat innocuous and feature even attained mythological standing, like Pokémon‘s enigmatic Missingno. Others are seared into online game historical past, like Minus International, an unbeatable Tremendous Mario Bros. point that you’ll be able to simplest get admission to through glitching right into a wall. Many insects were came upon, abused, and loved through the assiduous speedrunning community—how else would you beat Ocarina of Time in 17 mins?
The ones are the pleasant insects, even though. Maximum online game system defects are frustrating at absolute best and game-breaking at worst, which is why each recreation is going thru high quality assurance, an in depth trying out job applied to make certain that the entirety’s operating correctly. The time period “QA” attracts from the sector of products—microwaves, automobiles, meeting lines—and in some ways online game trying out isn’t any other. A tester’s process is to poke, prod, and play the hell out of a recreation till the entire kinks are long gone, like a factory-worker smoothing out the newest toy.
There is no recreation business same old on the subject of QA procedure—every recreation is other and each corporate has its personal process—but a tester generally spends months enjoying builds of the similar recreation over and over in all kinds of alternative ways. The extra insects a tester unearths, the upper his or her perceived worth to the corporate. That is one hell of a problem, after all: video video games are sophisticated units of interlocking techniques that require cautious, meticulous bug-testing, which is able to contain trying out the similar point time and again with slight variations—using a brand new personality, wielding a unique weapon, following an alternative pathway—and recording the entirety that occurs.
Take Grand Robbery Auto V, for instance. On Rockstar’s massive open-world recreation, QA testers needed to divide and overcome. “You would have individual testers assigned certain missions, or tasks, mini games etc.,” stated one one that helped take a look at the sport. “Normally starting with the big stuff and working down. So doing story missions in order, then heists, then side missions and random characters until you moved on to testing the strip club and prostitutes.”
From time to time, that tester stated, they might additionally must commit lots of time to granular portions of the sport, like when Rockstar’s designers requested a gaggle of QA group of workers to check the entirety avid gamers may just do with the sport’s computerized taxi carrier. They temporarily discovered that taking a taxi to a brand new challenge would cause the challenge with out correctly taking out the cab, main to a few a laugh moments as a taxi drove round and attempted to again up right through cut-scenes.
“I think working on a project like that is made a lot better by the small moments where something truly stupid happens,” the tester stated. “Talking pigs randomly standing up like a person and walking away, randomly being shot out of the sky in a plane by an ambient pedestrian whose physics had fired him into space. Trevor pulling his trousers down then never animating to pull them back up and spending the rest of the entire game with his trousers around his ankles. Franklin’s dog used to instantly die if he touched water… he’d just fall into a pool and sink to the bottom like a rock as soon as his paws got wet.”
Discovering insects is simply the primary step—the 2nd, considerably more difficult job is making an attempt to breed system defects so the corporate’s engineers can zap them. A tester can not simply write down one thing like “Trevor’s pants won’t stay on” and ship it to the programming staff; what may just engineers most likely do with that data? So as to observe down, isolate, and attach a trojan horse, coders want to know precisely the way it occurs, which could be a tough riddle to unravel given what number of variables are in video video games. Just right QA testers temporarily discover ways to stay observe of each motion they take—from giant to small—so they are able to no less than attempt to reproduce any trojan horse they bump into. “I love that working QA is often like being paid to solve puzzles,” stated veteran tester Rob Hodgson, who is carried out the process for 8 years now. “Figuring out how to reproduce that bizarre error you encountered, step by exacting step, is thrilling to the right kind of person.”
A regular day for a QA tester may just range enormously in line with the challenge, the position, and the placement. An outsourcer may must spend 10 hours slamming into each wall in the newest Name of Responsibility to look what breaks (“collision testing”). An embedded QA tester may must paintings with a programmer to determine why the framerate helps to keep losing at the Android model in their new cellular recreation. The various and monotonous nature of QA can lead to a few sudden demanding situations; for instance, one tester who labored at the rhythm recreation Rock Band stated the clack-clack-clack of plastic drumming may well be so maddening, they needed to set a rule: no tools on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
As they play, testers must kind up trojan horse reviews, utilizing device like JIRA to provide an explanation for what took place and the way it took place. Programmers—who preferably at this level are not operating on new content material and are completely solving bugs—analyze the reviews and reply as essential, now and again with questions, issues, and every so often snarky feedback.
When a console recreation is nearly carried out, it has to head thru certification, a job during which the writer (like, say, EA) will ask the console producer (Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo) to test the sport for game-crashing insects. Right through this certification job, a 2nd layer of QA group of workers known as compliance testers should pass throughout the recreation with their very own wonderful combs, checking to look if the entirety lives as much as expectancies. Each console-maker has its personal stringent tick list dictating the entirety from error messages to achievements, and if a recreation does not make the reduce, the writer should sort things and take a look at once more, closing dates be damned. “Microsoft required all games to be able to access the Xbox 360 menu from literally everywhere in the game,” stated one tester who labored in compliance for a significant recreation writer. “Sony required that you couldn’t skip the first time you see the publisher/development studio screens at the beginning of the game. Nintendo didn’t want any swearing in their games so every text input had an extensive filter we had to try and break.”
The Telltale Speedrun
“I didn’t play BioShock Infinite for at least two years after its release,” an ex-QA tester informed me not too long ago. He’d labored for 2K and spent intensive time trying out out Countless, and he wasn’t truly pleased with how the sport became out, noting that it did not are living as much as the unique.
“The one thing that got me to play the game again was seeing speed runs of BioShock. [We’d spent] a lot of nights speed-running the game. It was interesting to see what the speed-runners used to cut levels.”
One evening not too long ago, the tester noticed this video of a speedrunner breaking the sport’s global document. When he were given to the 11-minute mark, he began freaking out.
“I got so mad because they use a bug to get outside the level and automatically move forward,” the tester stated in an e mail. “I SHOULD HAVE CAUGHT IT!”
For a very long time the online game business introduced QA trying out as a dream process: hiya children, come receives a commission to play video games all day! However in recent times, horror tales have emerged—QA testers inform stories of monotonous paintings, grueling hours, and deficient remedy from firms that see them as replaceable cogs within the construction gadget.
There may be the cash downside, for instance. The process has low requirements—typical entry-level tester positions don’t want a lot enjoy or perhaps a school degree—and there is a ton of call for, so the pay is mediocre. A 2014 Gamasutra wage survey pegged the typical QA tester’s once a year pay at $54,833, yet that simplest mirrored full-time group of workers; maximum testers are contractors operating both immediately with builders or at third-party QA properties that juggle more than one writer purchasers. A lot of the ones contractors informed me their salaries ranged from $10 to $15 an hour—that averages out to $21-31,000 in step with 12 months.
Testers additionally communicate of feeling disrespected on the administrative center. Many in QA, particularly contractors, have informed me they were not allowed to talk immediately to the builders, and that their simplest verbal exchange got here within the type of written trojan horse reviews. “It was also sort of an unspoken rule that temps shouldn’t directly contact the devs,” one tester informed me. “Any communication was typically routed through the full-time QA Leads. As testers, all our interactions with dev were through comments in the bug database, which is far from an ideal form of communication. It was easy to interpret a developer’s comment/question on a bug as snarky/irritated when that wasn’t necessarily their intention.”
This is not the case at each studio—“When you give your testers benefits, upward mobility, job security, and respect, it attracts the right people for the job,” stated Ariel Smith, a tester on the MMO studio Cryptic who informed me she loves the gig—but disrespect for QA is unquestionably a standard pattern. A number of testers informed me they have got had to make use of facet entrances to go into their places of work and that they were not allowed to mingle with the remainder of the group of workers. Others stated it is not uncommon for different builders to screw with them in all kinds of tactics; one common tale, for instance, is of the engineer who fixes a trojan horse but frequently sends QA messages like “could not reproduce.” In an ordinary studio, QA is noticed as the ground of the totem pole. That is partly as a result of the character in their job—a tester’s position is to turn other folks the place they screwed up. That is all the time going to bruise some egos.
“The QA only care about finding bugs; the developers only care about fixing them,” a former tester informed me. “They aren’t a team and they aren’t working together. It’s almost like a game of tennis. The testers actually want the build to be broken because it ensures they have work to do. So, the two sides are kind of working against each other, which isn’t healthy for production.”
At some recreation firms, higher-ups give testers strict trojan horse quotas and threaten to shorten their contracts if they do not to find sufficient system defects, which can lead to a peculiar kind of rigidity as testers compete over who is discovering the most important insects first. From time to time, QA staff will to find inventive tactics to paintings extra hours so that they receives a commission extra and make themselves appear extra treasured to the corporate. “There were some testers who would hold onto bugs to make sure there’s overtime,” one tester informed me. “If there was no OT scheduled for the weekend they would enter a [major] bug Friday afternoon. In some cases this would cause overtime.”
QA testers additionally must care for recreation construction’s different systemic issues—particularly, obligatory crunch and common layoffs. Large builders have a tendency to rent dozens of QA testers towards the tip of huge tasks simplest to let all of them pass as soon as the sport ships. As a substitute of partying with the remainder of the builders, they are out searching for new jobs.
This all provides as much as what would appear to outsiders like an certainly heinous gig, however the process does have brilliant issues. Quite a lot of present and previous testers have informed me that regardless of QA’s many demanding situations, trying out video video games can also be rewarding and academic in a singular manner.
“I’ve enjoyed my time as a tester and I would do it again if I had to,” stated Obed Navas, a former tester who labored on video games like BioShock and Name of Responsibility. “Even though ‘QA Tester’ might not be the most glamorous title, and you run the risk of losing the passion to play at home, in the end, being able to see your name in the credits, and having specific items on you that people know you can’t find anywhere …and them asking you where you got it, being able to respond ‘I worked on it,’ it’s a great feeling and I take pride in that.”
Lunchtime Woes
Rob Hodgson, a online game tester, was once operating on an early construct of the multiplayer recreation Fallen Earth right through lunch in the future when abruptly the servers crashed. Now not lengthy afterwards, they crashed once more. Baffled, he attempted to breed the trojan horse, yet he had no luck—neither he nor any individual else on his staff may just determine what was the reason for one of these catastrophic error.
“It made no sense,” Hodgson informed me not too long ago. “We got one of the programmers to watch the logs as it happened, and he all but shrugged and threw up his hands. It seemed like someone had run off the edge of the world, and the servers were choking, trying to track him. But no one on the [quality assurance] team was testing the world edges, and the designers were all out to lunch!”
After scratching their heads for some time, Hodgson and staff requested round and ultimately discovered what was once bringing down the servers. “Turns out that the designers going out to lunch was precisely the problem,” Hodgson stated. “One of them had just been setting his horse on autorun and going out to eat. Some days it would hit a tree and get stuck. Some days it would get into the endless, flat plains beyond, and melt the servers.”
From Murderer’s Creed Solidarity to the PC model of Arkham Knight, as of late’s video games appear to be delivery with extra issues than ever sooner than. It is simple to pin the blame on QA. From time to time, that really well is also the case—a collection of veterans informed me that they have labored along sloppy, apathetic testers who simply did not care sufficient to do issues proper. Two other former testers informed me they might watch colleagues smoke weed right through lunchtime with regards to each day; one stated the QA group of workers would all put on sun shades in a futile try to cover it.
However numerous testers say they are discovering maximum if now not the entire insects that send in as of late’s video games. The issue is that no one’s solving them.
Maximum testers function utilizing a job known as triage, the place insects are prioritized in line with significance. Most sensible precedence are problems that make the sport crash—the “showstoppers,” as they are known as. Different system defects are categorised in line with how necessary testers suppose they’re. Typically, manufacturers and programmers will make the effort to mend showstoppers—it’d be onerous for any recreation to make it previous certification with any of the ones. However small or even moderate-sized insects incessantly stick with video games like barnacles, the sufferers of tight closing dates and programmers who can simplest do such a lot within the time they are given.
“We would often find that either the risk of fixing a bug or the time it would take weren’t worth it, especially when we were doing something really uncommon or deliberately breaking the game,” stated one tester who labored on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a recreation that is recognized for being each extremely large and uncommonly buggy.
“Some of our bugs would get resolved as ‘won’t fix’ or ‘post-release.’ Post-release meant, ‘This would be nice, but it isn’t really needed right now. If it becomes a thing people are calling out on the forums or online, maybe we’ll reassess this.’ I think there’s a lot more leeway nowadays than there was maybe 20 years ago, [because] you can say, ‘OK we have this nasty bug but it can be fixed in the day-one patch.’ That’s acceptable behavior now.”
As video games get larger and larger, making leaps in each graphical constancy and mechanical complexity, they are producing increasingly more bugs—bugs that may not be really easy to catch or repair. Construction studios can not simply trade a agenda as a result of they are beaten through system defects. Except the writer has the same opinion to what generally is a pricey lengthen, that vacation free up date ain’t going any place, regardless of how damaged the sport could be. So right through trying out, a number of QA staffers informed me, they focal point simply on catching the insects that will save you them from getting thru console certification. That may imply ignoring a few of a recreation’s different, most likely extra important issues.
“The game developers and the publishers had independent QA teams,” remembers one compliance tester who labored for a significant writer. “We would submit a bug with as much detail to recreate the condition as possible, the development team would determine if it was really a bug or not, and then they would either invalidate the bug or attempt to fix it. We would receive a revised build with ‘X’ number of bugs handled, double-check the problem was fixed, and then move on to the next thing. This aspect of the process, from a gamer’s perspective, was the most frustrating. Bugs that caused inconvenience for the player were often considered invalid because they wouldn’t affect the ability to release the game, and could be addressed later if people got upset.”
Different compliance testers say that, because of closing dates, they have got needed to to find loopholes or do the naked minimal essential to sneak thru certification and get started printing discs, promising {that a} day-one patch would come on free up day.
“If we were getting down to the wire and multiplayer was super broken, we’d focus test efforts on single-player/offline areas instead,” a tester informed me over e mail. “[Console-makers] would often fail games for severe issues in online functionality, but still allow us to release to manufacturing on the condition we provided a day-one title update to fix issue(s) X, Y, and/or Z. There wasn’t a way to guarantee all players would get a patch for single player/offline bugs since offline gameplay wouldn’t require an internet connection. So we’d tighten up offline content for final certification, knowing there were issues with online content, and then scramble to patch the online issues in time for launch. This was (unfortunately) a rather common process, and was usually due to a rushed & unrealistic timeline rather than dev/QA incompetence.”
From time to time, insects will make it right into a recreation for causes that appear baffling to out of doors observers. Writes one tester who did contract paintings for Nintendo of The usa: “The Sky Drop bug in Pokémon Black and White was something that we caught, but the game had already been released in Japan at that point so instead of fixing the issue they purposefully left it in the game to keep parity.” The tester added that regardless of those idiosyncrasies, Nintendo makes an specific level of recording each unmarried trojan horse and asking testers to incorporate video photos for each record they post. “I think this contributes greatly to their reputation for having quality games,” he stated.
One different compliance tester’s reason for the expanding complexity of bug-testing may make players angrier than ever at publishers: it is DLC, he says.
“Let’s say we have a game with 40 pieces of microtransactions/DLC,” the tester stated in an e mail. “Even if some or all these 40 DLC packages are simple unlocks of on-disc content, we have to test every possible combination of these 40 DLC packages, in all game modes, using different combinations of storage media (20 DLC packs on the hard drive, 15 on a USB flash drive, 5 on a memory unit, etc), mixing up what the host has versus what clients have in different online game modes, verifying graceful handling in the event some dipshit has all his DLC on an external storage device and decides to unplug that device, with each Title Update (1.01, 1.2, etc), with different save data, etc., etc.
“It would (and did) get the purpose the place it is actually not possible for people to bodily take a look at all imaginable combos/eventualities. It is one thing that will get exponentially harder as extra variables are added—like if you’ll be able to acquire DLC in-game.”
In short, this shit is tough. Multiplayer games are especially difficult for today’s QA departments to handle; even hundreds of testers can’t successfully replicate what will happen when hundreds of thousands of people are all shooting aliens on live servers. And while some testers say developers are working more closely with QA than they have in the past, nobody can change an unrealistic deadline.
“Milestone schedules these days are utterly absurd,” one former tester told me. “What [a] lot of folks most definitely do not perceive is that even for titles which have been in construction for, say, 3 years, just one.5 of the ones years is in fact complete, right kind manufacturing. And of that, simplest 9 months in QA. And of that, simplest 3 months at complete QA capability. Through then, we could be at content material lock. And so by the point we’re in a position to talk out, the sport is attaining Beta. It is a little bit of an exaggeration for some higher titles, yet fact for plenty of I have labored with. When QA talk, we’re heard… there is simply no time to react.”
‘No Hard Feelings’
Writes one former tester:
We were bundled away into bullpens. I was working with people that had been testing [game] for years and years, were so burnt out on it, but were still going because they had no other hope. Out of the probable hundreds of testers they go through a year, I think maybe two or three ever got hired on. They weren’t acquiring any new, valuable experience or skills during all that time. We got condescending emails saying “Congratulations! You will have simply earned 8 hours of holiday time!” like we were kids getting stars for good behavior. I don’t need that. Just put it on my paystub.
Meanwhile, new cars were showing up in the lot every couple of months. Ultra fancy, decked out cars that probably cost more than four or five testers’ annual income. They were throwing parties for themselves. When you’re grinding away and can’t afford new clothes regardless and you see that sort of thing, it takes a toll. When we launched, there was a massive round of layoffs. I think close to around 100, but I have no idea. All I know is, QA was pretty much wiped to bare bones. A few hours after they were all escorted off the campus, the launch party kicked off.
Things got bad for me in a lot of ways; a girl I was seeing at the time [left me]… I met a lot of good people that knew how terrible the situation was for us temps, and good people were leaving because of it. It frustrated everyone I worked with. I got bumped around from team to team. That last team was small with way too much work, but I learned a lot and they were really good people. When I told them I was leaving, there were no hard feelings. There was almost a hint of encouragement, like I was telling them I was going to quit drinking or something beneficial like that.
Is QA a viable long-term career? Or will it forever be a means to an end, a pathway to other, more interesting parts of game development?
While reporting for this story, I talked to around 60 QA testers, and of those, only four said they saw QA as a long-term career. Many used QA as a way to segue into producer or designer jobs at game companies; others tried it for a few months or years and then gave up, moving on to more lucrative fields. Those who do stay in QA and succeed in the role can find themselves moving into QA management, a field that’s more about handling other people than it is helping make video games. That’s unsatisfying for some folks, especially given that the stereotype of testers being young, immature, and unkempt is often true.
“As you progress into the position of QA Control, you begin to have studies that no one may just ever get ready you for,” said one veteran QA lead. “Testers appearing up in pajamas for paintings, testers sexually harassing one some other, testers getting stuck stealing… Even essentially the most mundane factor like ordering in meals can develop into a problem. QA is a box that skews very younger. Having the typical age of a staff be 18-19 isn’t unusual, and incessantly occasions that is their first actual process. It is a large problem to care for younger personalities and hormones.”
Several experienced game developers have told me there are few employees more valuable than a senior QA person—someone who knows how to properly write bug reports; who knows to focus on big-picture issues instead of some clipping or graphical issues; who knows how to work with other people to maximize efficiency and avoid dupes. Those people are rare—low pay and poor treatment combine to drive many QA testers away from the field before they get very far.
“Ahead of I left, I sat down with my supervisor, the affiliate manufacturer at the recreation, and requested him [for] recommendation,” said James, a former tester who asked me not to use his last name. “I sought after to understand how to make the leap from temp QA to everlasting QA in construction or any place else. He blatantly informed me, ‘Distance your self from QA… the earlier you’ll be able to get out of QA and distance your self from ever operating in it the simpler.’ After about some other 8 months, I left QA for excellent and gave up on operating within the online game business. I’m now operating at a developer of industrial device, and existence is rather less amusing, yet a lot more strong. The cash may be significantly better.”
Based On A True Story
The movie Grandma’s Boy, which came out in 2006 and stars Allen Covert as a video game tester, is something of a running joke among QA. People always ask testers: how much of Grandma’s Boy is true? The answer is usually “now not so much.”
One scene in the movie, in which the egotistical video game designer J.P. looks over a failed prototype and watches his main character’s head fall off, is often brought up as indicative of the movie’s inaccuracies (skip to 1:31):
Silly, right? Bugs don’t really happen like that. Except for when they do.
“It was once in a definite Kinect recreation that concerned impediment lessons in a TV display taste presentation,” a tester for a major publisher told me. “There have been fast intros of the display’s announcers originally of every point the place they might supply observation and set the scene. As soon as, and simplest as soon as, probably the most reporter’s head shifted off his neck and into empty house subsequent to his frame – then dropped directly down off of the display screen. No person may just ever reproduce it, and agree with me, we attempted.
“It was surreal – here I’d developed a distaste for Grandma’s Boy due to its inaccurate and somewhat trivializing take on my profession (‘Did that guy’s head just fall off? That shit doesn’t HAPPEN in real games!’), and it was being proven right in a small way. I’ll never forget it.”
Fantasies like Westwood Faculty’s are a some distance cry from the true global of online game trying out. In actual QA, the pay is low, the paintings is hard, and plenty of testers to find themselves in unenviable positions, outsourcing or doing contract paintings for recreation builders who do not even know their names. (Writes one tester: “I was once sent an email from HR asking for input on planning the company’s holiday party—I responded with some feedback and was then told that temporary employees weren’t invited.”)
Even those that discovered QA to be a delightful, rewarding process say issues may well be higher. Approach higher. A standard push for trade may just lead now not simply to more fit paintings environments yet to extra skilled, environment friendly testers who paintings immediately with recreation builders to make certain that extra insects get fastened.
“Game testing is, in general, a job of unsung and untrained heroes,” reads a record through an outdated QA corporate known as ST Labs. “For some companies, a typical game testing strategy still consists of throwing sheer numbers of testers on a game as it nears release and hoping that they find the big problems. Understanding the games issues and technology and going about game testing in a systematic and thorough manner is still a new concept for most game development companies.”
That record, written through Duri Worth and Ilya Pearlman, got here out in 1997. Eighteen years and 4 console generations later, now not a lot has modified. The great recreation testers are nonetheless unsung and untrained heroes, doing their absolute best to get video games fastened regardless of unreasonable schedules, unmotivated co-workers, and a task that is unappreciated at absolute best.
There may be otherwise of having a look at it, too.
“You *will* get stuck on shitty games, you *will* get stuck with shitty people, and you *will* get stuck with a Producer/PM that thinks QA Testers are *shitty* and beneath them,” one veteran stated. “You will work long hours, be underappreciated and see your amazing bug that you spent six hours working on be swept aside and labelled Known Shippable. But you will also see your name in the credits, you will also realize that you contributed to something really cool, and you will also move on to another amazing project.”
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