At one point in time I was a game tester at Electronic Arts. At the time I had delusions of grandeur about becoming a world famous game developer. Turns out my ambitions were far greater than my skill set. Anyway I was miserable as a tester just due to the lack of upward mobility. Looking back now it was a pretty phenomenal job. Perfect job for summer students or people fresh out of school. Decent pay lots of overtime free food.
I was just going to say that game tester isn't a job of "playing your favorite game." It's more like playing the same level many times a day and trying to recreate the same bug over and over (while recording the steps.)
Most people going into it don't know what they're going into.
But I never been a tester before (well, I test the games I made so I know some things,) that's just what I heard:
But I'll never know more than a person who worked in the industry, how accurate you think what I said above from your experience?
Oh you are completely right for the most part. I'm sure it would be different in a smaller company but for most of the testers you'd get assigned a game and a specific area. Like I always had the misfortune of being a Front End tester. I got to test the menus. Working at EA on games like NHL meant I did a lot of spell checking names and triple checking player stats. It was super tedious. Other testers got real lucky and were Gameplay testers and they just got to play and play. But even they had to try and recreate bugs so for example if you play two season games in a row and then exit out to the main menu the game crashes. You have no idea what caused that crash. Was it backing out of the game after 2 matches, or would it crash after 1 match? Does it matter what arena you were in, what teams? Did you have a create a player, did you do any trades, custom names for the announcer to call out? Does it happen in other game modes? Anyway you have to keep trying to repeat it to narrow down that bug. So again it gets tedious. But in retrospect I'd rather do that in the comfort of an air conditioned office then stand on a 30 degree incline roof in the hot sun cooking to death as a roofer or working at a fast food joint dealing with ignorant customers :) For casual and summer work the game tester is a pretty sweet go. I just didn't see it back then.
Thanks for the info. The conditions of work you described would really make it an enjoyable work (Only summer, air conditioned room, trying different things to reach the result you want.) If we added to that the ability to talk with the creators and being someone crucial for the game's release it seems like a worth it work.
Excellent, many today would like to have a job related to the world of video games, I recommend that if you want to be a developer, do not give up, pursue your dreams, I live in Venezuela, and everything here is limited, expensive and insecure everywhere, but I will never surrender to reach my dreams no matter how difficult they are. I also wish you the best of the world successful bro and a big hug.
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At one point in time I was a game tester at Electronic Arts. At the time I had delusions of grandeur about becoming a world famous game developer. Turns out my ambitions were far greater than my skill set. Anyway I was miserable as a tester just due to the lack of upward mobility. Looking back now it was a pretty phenomenal job. Perfect job for summer students or people fresh out of school. Decent pay lots of overtime free food.
I was just going to say that game tester isn't a job of "playing your favorite game." It's more like playing the same level many times a day and trying to recreate the same bug over and over (while recording the steps.)
Most people going into it don't know what they're going into.
But I never been a tester before (well, I test the games I made so I know some things,) that's just what I heard:
But I'll never know more than a person who worked in the industry, how accurate you think what I said above from your experience?
Oh you are completely right for the most part. I'm sure it would be different in a smaller company but for most of the testers you'd get assigned a game and a specific area. Like I always had the misfortune of being a Front End tester. I got to test the menus. Working at EA on games like NHL meant I did a lot of spell checking names and triple checking player stats. It was super tedious. Other testers got real lucky and were Gameplay testers and they just got to play and play. But even they had to try and recreate bugs so for example if you play two season games in a row and then exit out to the main menu the game crashes. You have no idea what caused that crash. Was it backing out of the game after 2 matches, or would it crash after 1 match? Does it matter what arena you were in, what teams? Did you have a create a player, did you do any trades, custom names for the announcer to call out? Does it happen in other game modes? Anyway you have to keep trying to repeat it to narrow down that bug. So again it gets tedious. But in retrospect I'd rather do that in the comfort of an air conditioned office then stand on a 30 degree incline roof in the hot sun cooking to death as a roofer or working at a fast food joint dealing with ignorant customers :) For casual and summer work the game tester is a pretty sweet go. I just didn't see it back then.
Thanks for the info. The conditions of work you described would really make it an enjoyable work (Only summer, air conditioned room, trying different things to reach the result you want.) If we added to that the ability to talk with the creators and being someone crucial for the game's release it seems like a worth it work.
Excellent, many today would like to have a job related to the world of video games, I recommend that if you want to be a developer, do not give up, pursue your dreams, I live in Venezuela, and everything here is limited, expensive and insecure everywhere, but I will never surrender to reach my dreams no matter how difficult they are. I also wish you the best of the world successful bro and a big hug.