MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin

> So my 10-year-old grandson has decided his chosen career will be beta testing games
> for a living. I told him this was unlikely, but I spoke out of turn as I'm no
> authority on this. I figured this community would be best at giving him a definitive
> answer. What say ye?

I concur with what JimmyU said.

There's no such thing as a "beta tester" job. When a game studio has an open beta, you don't get paid to play it. When a game studio has a closed beta, you either know people who get you into it or you don't, but you don't get paid for it either way.

QA testing is probably what he's thinking of, but that sort of job is extremely variable in terms of both compensation and satisfaction, but tends towards the low end of both.

QA tends to be stratified into about four tiers across the industry:
- Outsourcing groups that work on contract for major publishers like Sony, Microsoft, EA. It's a thankless job, more often than not you have no contact whatsoever with the development team itself. The job will most likely proudly declare that they don't work on bug quotas, but the reality is that you're still going to get dragged by your manager if you don't file as many bugs as Dave in the next cubicle over, who spends his time filing countless duplicate reports for what amounts to an identical issue, but affecting different in-game assets. Heaven help you if you try to focus on quality over quantity. The developers themselves most likely will come across as confrontational, if not outright condescending and hateful.
- Internal QA for the above major publishers. Exactly the same downsides. The only upside is that the job is potentially more stable, but you still stand a good chance of being the first to go if the studio needs to tighten the belt so the CEO can get his expected bonus this year.
- Internal QA for a publisher-owned studio. Somewhat more close contact with the development team, though developers can still act like jackwagons and be generally unappreciative of QA, despite it being the most important part of any development team. Just as liable to suffer layoffs if there aren't any titles that are currently in need of testing, possibly even moreso, because at least at the central publisher there's a more even cadence of titles to test.
- Internal QA for an independent studio. Probably the most satisfying of the lot, but still not a good leg up into the industry. There's little upward mobility. The stories you hear of people moving into production, programming, art or design roles is the textbook definition of "survivorship bias". They're still around to tell those stories - the 95% of testers who either burned out or got laid off aren't there to do so.

If your kid wants to actually get into game development, have him pick up a programming book, a pencil, or a set of level-design tools and start building skills and a portfolio.

Make him aware that overall, game development is not at all a stable industry to be part of, and when push comes to shove, he can make more money and work more reasonable hours with the same skill-set in a less "flashy" industry. You take what amounts to a pay cut to be able to put your name in the credits of a game.

It's a constant crapshoot to try to find the right studio. Publisher-owned studios have a level of stability compared to indie studios where if the current game doesn't go well, the whole studio might go under. Then again, publisher-owned studios are subject to the whims of the people over at the publisher, and so the whole studio might go under regardless, just because the CEO wants a bigger bonus.

Some game studios have a cringey tech-bro culture where if you're not hanging with "the dudes" and slamming back beers every Friday, you won't move up in the world. Some don't. Some studios will absolutely whip your ass to shit with unpaid overtime. Some won't. Some studios you get to make games that you yourself actually want to play. Sometimes you don't.

The reality is, game development is largely an under-paid, thankless job where your purported customers will just as readily spit in your eye as tell you that you did a good job. Countless folks get into the industry thinking they're going to be making Mario, or Fortnite - they never expect to be working on shovelware like Barbie's Magical Horse Adventure. But statistically, it's far more likely that they're going to be working on the latter than either of the former.

That said, I've been in this industry for 17 years now, and I can't see myself ever doing anything else. It took me until 2017 to find a studio that I could stand, and that could stand me, for more than about 2 years. But I've been at my current job for nearly 5 years now, and it really feels amazing. My coworkers are great, everyone including QA are treated with respect, the studio management are a great bunch of people who founded the studio back in 2008 for the purpose of just making fun games that they wanted to play. It can take a long-ass time to find that proverbial "forever home", but when you do, it feels amazing.