Hey hey hey! NFTs ya’ll!
Fuck, no!
Oh neat, I’ll check those out!
Which, in turn, seems like switching chairs around the industry so it doesn’t seem like it’s the same chairs.
If they’re playing games, they’re being used wrong. Good, useful reports take skill and experience, which in turn could be used to prioritize at the source, say. Or stop doing the thing with brute force, that, at least, would be a decent excuse.
Yeah, they’re free to do whatever they want, especially since costumers don’t care one omicron. But I can still complain they should be honest, or that people shouldn’t buy the MBA-speak.
The above tells me you came here with an agenda and not to read my words. All I was saying to @KevinC is he can easily answer his own question of “Does the game industry really place so little importance on domain knowledge??” by recalling all the busted videogames he’s played in his lifetime. Answer, “They probably don’t.”
I appreciate the idealists that populate Qt3 in droves. I really do. Sometimes I think many of you are out of touch with the world outside your window and how it actually operates, both good and bad.
@Telefrog’s comment above says exactly what I thought when I read “we hope you’ll join us today in demanding better working conditions for QA in the industry.” Like, how can we actually help them with that? Post on Twitter?
I will be the odd duck in supporting Ubisoft is ripping off people with NFT. If someone really pays for a ‘unique’ ‘digital collectable’ of a video game helmet that says #4591 on it, well, is that bad that a fool is separated from his money?
Well, all I’m saying is what people do is more important than what they say; good, bad, or inevitable should be measured from the right thing, though not absolutely.
As to what to do, I mean, not implying they spend worktime having fun playing games helps; that’s not the job.
I have about the same of an agenda as someone who doesn’t want to see it discussed as it’ll all be fine if we don’t care about it; better games.
My theory is partly that srs bsns software is more about the data. Things are in a state, you perform an operation, you verify that the correct state change occured. If it did, test success. If it didn’t, test failed. Yes there is a UI, but that’s what the professional testers are for.
So much more in games is about the visual aspect. It’s also a lot harder to programmatically test you are getting the “correct” response in a lot of scenarios. There are also huge numbers of assets and complex environments, and frequent large changes even with the project in a late stage. There’s just a lot more manual ground to cover.
I think there’s also an aspect of it’s easier for games to get cheap people who actually care, at least at first, and an aspect of gamedev being slow to adopt best practice.
The staffing at 343 was also unstable, partially because of its heavy reliance on contract workers, who made up almost half the staff by some estimates. Microsoft restricts contractors from staying in their jobs for more than 18 months, which meant steady attrition at 343.
Hunh… I must have missed the walkouts over this at 343 Studios, aka Microsoft, the largest software maker in the world?
Thanks for posting these. Much better than me just asserting, “Trust me, automating testing in games is really hard and doesn’t get you terribly far.”
Microsoft usage of temps (and the mandatory timeouts to avoid making people employees) is not new:
Whoa, this was a pretty big game on Steam when I looked last.
Thank you for posting this.
MS famously laid off all their QA staff over half a decade ago replacing it with unpaid customers in the form of the Insiders program.
Activision Blizzard employees are striking
I doubt they were promised permanent positions and knew about the 18 month limit, as it was pretty standard. Obviously they did the contractor thing in an ethical and sensible way. (as sensible as heavily relying on contract work for an artistic endeavor might be)
If there isn’t a hideous cartoon animal on these helmets, how are they supposed to appreciate at all?
Not Riot’s fault, but what a terrible scam for the victims.
At first, it seemed like a dream come true. A would-be games industry worker received an email from a recruiter asking them to apply for a job at Riot Games. After a brief interview process that spanned multiple rounds over email and Discord, they got the offer. Everything looked official. All paperwork had the Riot logo and professional job copy, seemingly sent from a person who worked at Riot Games. Then, the Riot Games human resources representative — or, rather, a person posing as a representative — started asking for money.
The applicant was young, newly graduated from college, and unsure about hiring protocol during the pandemic. They went along with the process, supplying the representative with the information they asked for: Everything from banking information for direct deposit and hundreds of dollars for an “expensable” Apple iPad Pro.
Oh man, that sucks. I feel for that poor kid.
At this point we should just have a template where we can fill in the blank for which game studio we’re talking about. :(