In QA you need to have a core crew. This comprises of highly skilled testers who can break the hell out of the game on multiple levels. (Online, networking, gameplay, frontend, peripherals, technical standard checks, legal, ESRB, etc…) and then you have a giant horde of noobs who, barring rare exceptions here and there, are by and large useless load monkey’s who have to be spoon fed everything. The hiring standards are so low that the people that enter QA continually go from bad to worst to bizzaro. Every year there’s a one upper that leaves everyone scratching their heads on how this person managed to survived passed adolescence.
That said, without any skilled testers on a title, that title is up shits creek. I have seen titles crash and burn all the way to final because there aren’t enough skilled testers assigned to it. Give me 15 skilled testers over 100 fresh off the boat n00bs any day.
God, it’s so true. We have one monkey here who doesn’t respond. One of our guys didn’t believe it, so we told him to go ask the guy a question. So he did.
The monkey sat there staring at him. Without saying anything or making any move to communicate at all.
Ha, ha, Charles, those guys are a dime a dozen in QA. There are some real winners though. People that come in drunk or stoned out of their mind. People who are literally batshit insane or discover a new definition for the word retarded. So many stories.
Once in a while we’ll even get a person who never played a video game before in their life…WTF!
However, when we considered only the entry-level people holding the specific titles “programmer” or “engineer,” the average salary dropped to just $57,913 – which still isn’t a bad paycheck to rake in your first year out of college.
Excuse my while I go shoot myself.
Note to self for next life: stay the fuck out of the film industry and get a real degree.
“Shitty” pay is when you spent 10 years providing loyal service for a company, get kicked to the curb with a $1500 severance check and a “see you later,” never break 40k in a single year, and currently see your income hovering around the high 20s in a city whose cost of living makes that a subsistence wage.
You know Gordon, I’m really sorry that you are unhappy. But I don’t see why you have to follow me around commenting on my life because you don’t like yours.
I don’t subscribe to absolutism. Just because I make more money than some people doesn’t mean I have to shut up and accept sub-par wages for the amount of work and effort I put in.
If you don’t like hearing people mention in a roundabout fashion how much money they make, maybe you should stay out of “how much money people make” threads?
Or are you fishing for sympathy? Because if so, I’ve been there. I worked for a year at Bioware making 20k a year or less, Canadian, at a time when that came out to around 13k a year USD (Poverty line in Canada is 24k a year). I lived in a shithole apartment in a bad part of town and on top of that still had to commute 45 minutes each way, and had to spend a good chunk of the money I was making on fast food at work because I worked such long hours that I didn’t have time to do things like: get to a store before it closed. During the time I was making that little, I worked 60 days straight at an average of 16 hours a day, without a single day off.
Yeah man, it sucks to be there. Maybe you should do what I did.
I’ve been looking at getting into QA as a hopeful start into design. What is the difference between someone who is in the highest position of QA and a consultant, similar to Mark Cerny (misspelled?).
This makes me sad, because a good tester does not necessarily have the skills to be a good producer. While both require good organisational skills, the tester neds to be almost obsessive where the producer needs to be a good people manager.
What’s wrong with that? As long as your entire QA team isn’t made up of gaming noobs then its actually a great idea. You will learn some unexpected and helpful things from an inexperienced player, because they don’t bring all the usual gameplay expectations to the table. I suppose it depends how your QA dept works, but we like to get gameplay feedback from QA as well as bugs. Like a continual playtest.
Oh my. The two jobs are worlds apart. A lead tester manages the QA team and communicates with the dev team to help track down bugs in more detail, create and manage the test plan etc. Mark Cerny is an experienced developer himself, who comes in to help dev teams with the game design and technical processes the code team uses. He can do this because he’s an experienced programmer and designer. Lead QA helps the dev team refine and improve a game they have already designed and implemented. Consultants help dev teams create the processes to make the game, and refine those processes as they go along.
In terms of “producers,” where would those people come from if they don’t come from other positions in the industry? I ask this primarily out of selfish reasons, as I’m working as a product manager for a small (~1800 user) software product in a likewise small publisher, and have often thought about the game industry.
I wanted to be a game programmer in college, but I ditched it because I generally did not like the programming classes, there isn’t a very large game industry in this area, the general feeling was pay was pretty low, etc. etc. But now I look at it and $58,000 fresh out of college isn’t too bad! It’s a hell of a lot more than I made (as an entry level actuary with no tests passed), but I am above that now and happy, so all’s well I guess. My question is, is that $58K with the insane hours stereotypical of the game industry? Or has the big companies generally toned that down?
Because there’s a big difference between 40-45 hours and 70+.
It’d be interesting to know how normal the distribution was, what the standard deviation was, etc. $58k is a lot more than the perceptions levied around here would have led me to believe, but if there are still a preponderance of dev studios in places where $58k isn’t substantially above the poverty line, then it’s really not “$58k” to a lot of folks seeing that number. (Actually in general it would be nice if they normalized the income for cost of living and then gave it in dollars at a unity indexed location for easy conversion.)
Having to tell them how to plug in a controller, how to power on the system, what each button is suppose to do, answering questions that are common knowledge to gamers, and generally they need extra extra “special attention.”
Feedback and design stuff is for focus groups and the like. We are trying to ship a game here.
Note, In the Pre-Alpha, Alpha stage, when not all content is finalized, such feedback makes sense. But at that stage usually only the core testers are working on the title. By the time the noobs roll in it’s mid to sometimes late beta and we’re gonna hit crunch. The last thing I want to deal with is someone who doesn’t know how to work a gamepad.
Does anyone know of any surveys like this comparing salaries of people in the game industry doing the same work as those without? I mean application programmers versus game programmers and such. Basically I want to know if I went into the wrong field!
