Day 261 of writing every day.
Having messaged with an ex coworker who still works in translation recently, I’m thinking back on my experience working in localization and how crappy it is to work in the gaming industry and the testing industry that plays a major supporting role. The programming behind many big titles these days is huge and frankly there’s a lot to test to work out issues before a game can be released on the market.
However, rather than focus on the work involved I want to talk about the treatment of workers instead. Given that games are essentially project based, there’s a start and end date with varying stages that requires different amounts and types of labor. Testers don’t come into the picture until the middle and later stages when there’s actually something to work with not on the scripting side.
In the past, testing would’ve been handled in-house and still does for many smaller studios if I had to make a guess. If we’re talking console games, its easy as the machine specs are the same, but when it comes to PCs, things get a lot more complicated, and I’m guessing for smartphones as well. That is because there gets to be a much wider variety in specs and even systems that a game will need to be able to run on that will need to be checked for issues.
Hiring testers isn’t cheap though as it’s preferable to have people who have some knowledge and experience that know how to approach and devise comprehensive tests meant to examine if things really are running as intended. Random untrained people might be more susceptible to leaving things unchecked or not noticing something that’s subtle but problematic.
The nature of the work makes it difficult for the job to be permanent full-time testers as there will need to be a steady queue of games waiting to be tested, and even once tested, there needs to be waiting time for fixes and updates to be made and rechecked again. This makes it hard for a tester to jump back and forth between different projects in development as the schedule will fluctuate with development and fixed. It’s not like building a house where you follow the schematics, a game often needs to revisit parts and move them around, making progress inconsistent.
Long story short, game testers who help find the bugs in games might work full-time hours, but the work can be unsteady, making it difficult to arrange a situation where they’re always involved in a project. However, the same goes with any job that pays people to be somewhere for a set amount of time per day regardless of how busy or slow their day is. If a company is able to make a profitable business by providing testing services, then there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be doing the same for testers who may not have a project to work in at the moment where other companies are already paying employees whether or not they’re doing any actual work.
I’ll write more later.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 