Day 263 of writing every day.
When games only need testers for a certain portion of the entire duration of a project, it makes more sense to hire the services of a tester provider with a reliable availability of full-time experienced permanent staff backed by an even larger group of part-time staff and subcontractor contacts. Having things done in-house becomes burdensome when it places the duty of test their own product extensively on staff on top of their existing duties and responsibilities. Plus the need to hire people in a rush can adversely impact the schedule of a project if in-house testers are temp workers.
By outsourcing testing to testing service providers, game development studios can get their products tested by experienced people with an outside perspective on their product at a more reliable schedule. Managing projects alone can be a burden that requires experienced leaders who can communicate and plan well. But this comes at a higher cost than doing things in-house.
In order to make money with all the managers and testers, a testing service provider will need to charge a studio enough money to cover the cost of equipment, infrastructure and space, and labor among other things in order to churn out a profit. But by being a testing service provider, they can be open to taking on requests for tests
Personally I think as long as you make enough profit as a company to sustain a reasonable standard of living for everyone working there and as the owner(s), there’s no reason to try and forcibly increase profits by finding ways to further exploit employees simply because as the owner and management you have the ability to do so without their consent. I sense this attitude of forcing people to return to the office that’s been gaining traction as something that I find disagreeable that serves as an example of behavior I wouldn’t want to engage in if I was running a business.
Fortunately for employees in Japan, employers are obligated to reimburse employees for their commuting costs, so they actually might prefer to have workers stay home if possible and pay them a much cheaper monthly electricity bill stipend.
But for the gaming industry, secrecy is a major concern and it’s not conceivable to have teams of testers working from home, especially temp workers who might be tempted to start leaking screenshots or confidential information privy to insiders not meant for social networks and the public. Data is transferred on secure networks and accounts, so there will be at least a need to use a VPN to connect to and access needed files. The equipment needed to perform tests can be expensive and bulky, and the more equipment employees need to have at home, the more space they’ll need to dedicate to work. There are tester kit game consoles with different settings from mass produced consumer use consoles that are often rented by the company, and not everyone may be able to set them up properly on their own without the help of an experienced leader next to them.
Given the above, the cost of starting and maintaining a testing service provider business is probably a lot higher than a company that simply hires programmers to code and do more “technical” skilled work. At the same time, there’s no way you can automate tests for games meant to be played by human users. If AI and automation could test games for problems, then the game was never designed to be played at all since it runs on its own. Games are systems and scripts that humans enjoy playing via an interface, and no matter what you try to do, there’s no getting rid of the labor needed.
Some businesses are just hard to churn out a huge profit simply because of the nature of how the work must be done. That is why I think the gaming industry needs to break free from the greedy investors who see games as just another commodity to be restructured into a shape that gets the most dividends paid to shareholders. My opinion is that it has corrupted the system and grossly promotes the release of incomplete games sold in bits and pieces that are released over time as opposed to being a complete and finished product. This break up of games into smaller components ends up making more money as the smaller transactions seem more affordable, but many people may end up spending a lot more in the end.
And sadly the bigger earnings aren’t reflected in improved quality of life for the workers. It’s just for the quarterly earnings to convince the richest shareholders to keep their money in the company by paying them back constantly like a loan that never gets paid back. Imagine if a million dollars gets invested into whatever business you run, but every time you pay a bit of interest back in the form of dividends, the amount you owe just keeps growing. Unless your business fails, you’re obligated to not only keep paying, but to listen to the biggest stakeholders, which means they own you in a sense and you’re no longer the real owner of what you do.
This is why crowdfunding has seen a rise in popularity with gamers and studios. Rather than catering to investors with the promise of ever-increasing returns and giving rich people, who could care less if quality games are being made and customers are happy, a controlling voice in how things are done, crowdfunding allows a large number of players to give their input on what they like to see fixed and added to increase enjoyment.
Granted that if funding goals are not met, a studio will have to resort to other means to finance a project, making crowdfunding not the perfect solution either. Regular people only have so much money to spare as well, so unless they see a proposal that looks solid, it’s going to be hard to commit their money based on the promise of a product they have only seen drafts of.
But with the internet making the world an open market for many games, it’s gotten simple enough for indie developers to try their hand at making something that might become a hit. Releasing games internationally means needing to localize the game in the sense of translating them and making sure there isn’t anything that would be culturally problematic or potentially draw the ire of the authorities regulating the market and morals of whatever countries.
So testers and translators focused on language and cultural appropriateness are now needed as well in the business of providing testing services. But again, these types of labor costs are hard to reduce. The consequences of trying to make more money by making people involved in these repetitive and technically simple jobs for the same amount of pay is unfair to workers.
And sadly the truth is that the dirty corporate mindset has kept wages suppressed while work productivity went up. The fruits of one’s labors, despite yielding more, all seem to get streamed upwards to people who do nothing but sit on their money and exploit the rules to their own benefit.
My experience in the industry was one where I lost the right to work a set schedule like a 9 to 6 day, but instead was told to work whatever hours the project demanded like shift based work but the 8 hour shifts were decided for me and I had no say whatsoever over any of the choices made for me. If I was translating, I could have some measure of freedom, but if I was testing, it was like being a cog in the machine again and having to sit in a room where the company obviously valued the equipment more than the people who did all the tedious work to verify that everything is working as designed.
While the pay was decent for an unskilled job, people working as testers in the gaming industry aren’t doing anything at work that would give them the experience or hone skills that could be readily transferred to other fields. Only a small handful might be given leadership roles but the rest would just have to work in a dead end job and hope that they’ll be able to retire some day because they’re not being paid enough and are being forced to sit so long every day that it’s adversely affecting their health.
I’ve said enough on this subject and will make this my last post on it.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 