It's been nearly 20 years since I was doing game QA and it's kinda crazy how things really haven't changed (and in some cases gotten worse). For example: bug quotas were "kinda outdated and on their way out"... 20 years ago.
Considering I have a friend in a small (but large enough company to know better) whose employer still uses lines-of-code as a metric during annual performance reviews, these dumb ideas can stick around unreasonably long. Ironically, he doesn't want to leave that job; it's easy enough to game the system and look productive that he just spends most of his time goofing off.
If it makes you feel any better, I've been working QA at Blizzard Entertainment for 14 years and bug quotas have never been a thing. Mostly, we joke about how dumb the concept is.
I'm still not entirely sure what "bug quota" really means. I think I understand it, but I'm not sure. Is it a system where each QA member has to identify an arbitrary number of bugs and then report them by an arbitrary deadline? If that's what it is, then what happens if the current game build at that point just...really doesn't have a lot of bugs? Do all of the people in QA get shitcanned? That doesn't make a lick of sense. Why should QA be punished for the game developers finally getting around to making a mostly bug-free build, or at least a build with less bugs than the previous iteration? Isn't QA meant to make that happen for the developers? Why are they getting punished for that? Corporatism is fucking stupid. So fucking stupid. I've always felt that QA needs to work as closely as possible with the actual developers because it just makes sense. Compartmentalization is useful up to a certain point, but eventually it becomes a serious problem and drags everything down with it. I can understand a publisher wanting to heavily micromanage and compartmentalize development staff and QA staff. They probably think "if we gave all these silly millennials access to things they need to do their job then maybe they'll leak something to the public!" On the other hand...maybe if the QA staff were treated fairly and equally to the rest of the staff they would feel less inclined to risk their job by doing something like that. Wow what a big shocker, the underpaid and overworked 20 something that is living with his or her parents while paying off college tuition decided to leak an experimental build of the game to the public. Gee I wonder why they did that, don't they want to keep their job!!??? This is why corporatism is fucking stupid.
George should put that Skillshare to use by learning how to turn the focus ring on his camera lens. All joking aside this is a good-ass look into the most hidden dark side of this dogshit industry, thank you rabbit man.
And also how to set white balance. His videos are well paced but goddamn the quality of his footage is distracting sometimes. Out of focus, poorly exposed, wrong white balance. At least it's something fixable.
He has a camera with manual focus!? What witchcraft is this!?!? Ah, mobile phones huh. XD I really miss the camera app on my nokia 520... Because... Who knew manual controls would be useful with a camera... oh, wait... But no, I transitioned to a phone worth about 7 times as much, yet the experience of using the camera is infinitely crappier...
I've been working for a little while for Lionbridge, an outsourcing QA company. We're extremely well treated. 8 hours per day, no OT, no pressure, correct pay. We can even miss days without too much consequences. The work is monotonous, yes, but the team cohesion makes it pleasant. I haven't seen layoffs yet. Of course, though, in 3rd party QA, you have ZERO hope of climbing the ladder, but most people here love their job anyway. Edit : I forgot to mention. We even get paid for "standby", which corresponds to time when you're not assigned to a project and just fuck around in the office or on a computer.
@Old World Blues And like most other things in the world, Unions still will be influenced by how well function the society around it is. If Labor is underpaid, you will get a lot of weird greedy people in the union, that hopefully will use the collective bargaining for everyone instead of just stroking their ego or accepting bribes. Unions are essentially a political platform that tries to do collective bargaining against corporations and enterprises, instead of allowing the individual to do that. Things like insurance, legal aid, and a few other benefits is what will generally allow them goodwill for their members. Things like parallel investigations on accidents/death, or even having a place to start dumping evidence of management corruption is also something that will earn long term goodwill.
Unions aren't great, but an increasing body of evidence does still seem to suggest that not having one in your industry is detrimental to your working conditions, more often than not. There is no 'right' answer. We're stuck with the best options we have, even if objectively speaking, they're awful. That capitalism sucks is not an argument for communism, but at the same time it's also not actually an argument in favour of capitalism either. When all your options suck, the best you can do is choose the least sucky one... But the moment something better actually shows up, the writing is on the wall for the existing systems... ... As happened multiple times over the past few thousand years...
Damn. I missed whatever outreach you did to get sources, but can corroborate pretty much everything you're saying here as I did publisher QA for about 5 years a decade ago at one of the companies I know you heard from other employees about based on the info you've been provided here. So, I'll just try to add a "fun" anecdote to add to the whole experience of hell that is QA (and when you do it for a bit you get a lot of . . . interesting stories of existential terror) and specifically the weird ass classism. My first ever business trip was while I was still very new as a Junior QA Test Engineer/Analyst at Major Publisher QA in California. A game in dev for the launch of a brand new console cycle was in its uber crunch mode, and somewhere in the management chain at Major Publisher, it was decided that internal QA at the developer was a blocked pipeline, as there were only 2 testers in the internal QA department at the developer, while the team at the publisher had a staff of around 30 day shifters, a dozen night shifters and a half dozen skeleton screw shifters (because yes, at this particular time 24-hour testing was very much a thing, and yes during crunch you could float between all three shifts some days). So I, along with a colleague were sent to the developer's HQ to work with the dev's QA team and thus the actual devs themselves in a 1-on-1 manner to try and find bugs in the very temporary builds made between the builds that normally get sent to publisher QA for full sweeps (I discovered later we were chosen because we were both very new hires not our particular skill levels, so our removal from networking opportunities to advance our careers or remembered by our supervisors to get a performance review required to get a raise at the publisher was not seen by either of us as a detriment - we only discovered how damaging this was in the long term at the publisher once we came back). When we got to the state that the developers were in, my fellow lowly tester and I were treated to the most bizarre experience. Because upon arriving at the developer's studio (after standard hotel checking in, yadda yadda stuff) we were immediately ushered into the office of the president of the company for a chat with him, much to our surprise and shock. When we got into the room, the president of the dev's company came at both myself and my fellow lowly QA tester with a quick speech of utter contriteness for the project not being finished on time, promises to hit the deadline for sure and this whole bluster of niceties that only stopped when he must have registered the look of utter confusion that had to have been playing out on my and my colleague's face, when he finally asked us who we were exactly. We told him that basically, we were just extra grunts for the testing mill to help out - a favor from the publisher basically - but he had been under the impression that we were much more important producers on the project basically sent by the publisher to spy on the devs at first. There was a bit of minor embarrasment on his part but by the end of the day were would finally be assigned to the dev team to do the job we were sent there to do. (This strange experience also led - entirely due to being in the president's office at the time - hearing from one of the dev team members talk to the President about withholding sending out future review copies to a particular gaming magazine in the future for not giving out as glowing a review as they wanted for the game we were working on, so uh, yeah, media blacklists are real as hell folks) This led to the odd situation where our status went through the most rapid shift ever since we had started out at the dev house with a case of mistaken identity, were given this red carpet treatment introduction, then kicked back to the lowest position the company had within about a four-hour period (because we were working a full 10-hours that night, believe you me, jet lag or no jet lag). To getting to enjoy the "fun" of being told that we didn't get to partake in the dev team's free crunch lunch catering and had to procure our meals off site at a nearby strip mall fast food joint (literally got kicked out of a lunch line once it was discovered, like this was kindergarten all over again and the other kids found out we had cooties). To getting completely isolated and locked out of pretty much any meetings with anyone else on the dev team - or really, any personal interaction at all with our "betters" - other than our directly assigned superiors from then on after meeting the literal company president day one. And the CRAZY thing . . . this was *still* a much better experience and job than it was at the Publisher QA offices. By like, a 1000%. Because at Dev QA you may have gotten shunned and separated into a tiny little corner of the studio (we got to know the two other full-time testers there quite well, really nice dudes, in our little tester ghetto) but we did actually get to directly interface with the developers enough to build rapport, trust, and some level of working respect over time . . . which NEVER happens in publisher QA since it's all so impersonal and you have bunch of layers of bosses between you and the actual folks doing the actual coding and art for the game (since every bug has to go through like, 3-4 layers of approval before it can or will get addressed). We got our own actual cubicles instead of being crammed into folding tables like at the Publisher HQ, and even though we were kicked out of the lunch room for the first couple weeks and not allowed to eat with the cool kids in the cafeteria, by week three they had calmed down enough that we could at least bring our lunches to the cafeteria and eat with them, and honestly, our small but agile little team of testers was working really effectively since we didn't have to wait long periods for build approvals and printing like at the publisher HQ. We even had access to some basic QA automation tools and more advanced software I was never exposed to in the California home offices. So yeah, the difference between Publisher QA and Developer QA is super real. The Classism is real. The horrible working conditions (in comparison to other positions in the industry - obviously this isn't like, an actual sweatshop) are real. The absurdity of trying to live in a high cost of living city on this rate of pay is real (I lived with two fellow testers in a very cheap apartment in a ghetto part of LA County to make it work, but there were some extreme examples, like this pair of brothers who commuted something like 50 miles every single morning at 3-4 am). The arrested development of your career until you realize that you have to move on after wasting half a decade of your life is real. It's all true. All of it.
Very interesting story, too bad you killed it with "must of" :( I know most people use contractions and must've sounds a little like must of, but... do people really never wonder what they are saying? never use written language? Really never encountered modal + have + past participle?
That is all just so astoundingly petty and incompetent. Apparently these development and publisher houses really are like kindergarten, considering how they all behave.
I sorta was a part of this in 2009. An "assignment" of stocking the background for large game presentations during E3. A fair sized group encountered some reporters (who were intentionally segregated) started doing some unconventional gameplay... It was good fun for 20 seconds or so before the lead ran in shouting for who started. Anyway to the meat of the video, yeah, you pretty much nailed it on the head. Mine was even so far as to say that the conveniently located break room on the second floor was only for *company* employees. Along with the onsite gym, nearby parking, and outdoor street events. Worst offense for me personally was the promise of a new assignment... For two years while checking in bi-weekly religiously.
Holy crap though. As an amateur game developer (going on 20 years now - I do it for my own amusement), the idea that my QA testers aren't allowed to talk to me is abhorrent. Not even because it just seems kinda sick, but just on a practical level. Sometimes the best way to understand what a tester is complaining about (after all, I have to fix whatever they find, usually), is to, you know. Talk to them? An environment that bans that is not going to be very productive in the slightest...
Welcome to working for large companies in everything, where politics and hierarchy rule above all else, levels and layers of departmental bosses and managers demanding endless updates and reports towards progress and meeting targets, in a system of rigorously enforced fear and loathing for each layer to ensure everyone knows their place and should not dare challenge those above who could make their working life a misery.
It seems like some "divide and conquer" tactics are at play here. Whether they are conscious or systemic I'm not sure. If the "crucial"/rare employees talk to and make friends with the "expendable" ones, there may be greater support for not treating the "expendable" employees as, well, expendable. Further, instead of fighting each other they can team up and actually negotiate getting proper pay for the value they're generating.
Fun Fact: Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe in Liverpool UK used to sack their First Party Quality Assurance testers for two weeks on the eve of them working for the company for two years in order to skirt around employment law in the United Kingdom (and that was when they were feeling kind) ... Until April 2018, when they moved all of the contractors over to being employed by an outside agency, but still working in the same building as everyone else. As long as they are employed by an outside employment agency SIEE does not have to adhere to the same employment laws, meaning they can just employ them as non-permanent staff in perpetuity without suffering repercussions if they sack them after two years of contiguous employment. So for them to be employed by the outside employment agency, they have to pay that agency money on top of what they are paying the workers in wages. For those keeping up, this means they are literally paying out more money to deny workers their rights and dodge UK employment laws. Note when I said "when they were feeling kind"? They would also sack workers who had booked off a week on holiday at Xmas for a few weeks just to wipe out their holiday allowance, and then re-employ them a few weeks later on the hope they would feel the need to crunch over Xmas to make up for the weeks they were umemployed. Not to mention the time they did a fuckload of lay-offs on Xmas Eve 2014, that was a hoot! ... Except it wasn't nice in the slightest. I hear down the grapevine that workers are being mispaid by the external employment agency on a regular basis, and that not much has improved. This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more stories where this came from.
I remember working as a dev and getting publisher QA reports that would make me rage. We had no idea they had a quota and we'd get things like manipulated videos or images to report bugs that didn't even exist. Ultimately it made us waste a lot of time chasing a fake problem instead of solving the real ones, and I bet it made many QA people anxious.
This video is a godsend. I've recently come out of a QA job a few months ago after being treated like complete shite for over a year. You weren't allowed to talk in the office - not even ask how someone's weekend was because that's "not work related" and should be saved for break times. We were expendable, and were let go if someone in the "bubble buddies club" didn't like you. The hierarchy system was shocking, if you unintentionally annoyed the wrong person - say goodbye to any potential progression because you may have offended someone by saying the word "lame". I've managed to land a job as an Environment Artist for an indie company though, and goddamn does it feel good to stick it to em'. I'm trying to get some of my other QA pals to come join the company, as they deserve so much better. Thank you for this video.
Great vid. Few years ago I moved from games QA to business QA and it was the best decision in my life. Work is only slightly more boring, but my quality of life and salary both skyrocketed. Gaming industry is currently a hellhole. Exploitation of workers is a norm, even something to be expected. And what's worse, many people justify their own exploitation with "at least I'm doing what I love". Too bad you can't eat thar love, or use it to pay the bills.
I work at a small software company as a full stack developer. I can't really speak for the game industry. We have one QA guy in our team, he's involved in the development cycle, tests almost everything and even does some sales stuff. The bugs that guy finds helps me and my fellow developers a lot, i'd go as far as to say he is essential. Good QA is essential for any developer, not being able to talk to QA people and discuss the things they find is bad practice and leads to bad software.
Hoy, I work for a third-party QA outsourcer. I used to be a QA Tester, now i'm in their HR department (of note, my part of the HR Department is 90% ex-testers.). Maybe i was lucky, but honestly, this made me feel like i was well treated. I started on a AA episodic title, moved to a AAA title with some very softly enforced crunch. I then moved on to an evergreen project for a couple years before ending up in HR. I always had a livable (albeit very low) wage (And i am pretty frugal)... I agree that most people can't really climb up the ladder, the senior positions open up very rarely and sporadically, as do test lead or project manager positions. That said, once you were through asa senior, it became much easier to climb up. Again, i understand i was exceedingly lucky for being indispensable on long-term projects, but i believe a good 60% of the tester positions during the year are on evergreen or very-very long term projects... So the contract breaks aren't that abundant. Just wanted to echo what was said at the beginning and end, though. if you have something better to do, do it, QA is not a good ladder up, especially not third party QA. I literally had nothing better i could get due to various reasons... that's why i stuck it out despite knowing i could do better. like, theoretically. The only ONLY possible way from third party QA to game design is, like..... Being sent to a client for a project and being kept there, which is super rare because clients are not supposed to poach testers from the 3rd party companies. great video, A+ research, i wish i knew about it before as i would have contributed. PS: The video also is making me want to get back to work on my games.
George doesn't produce 'content'. He makes videos. I find it very strange that so many people - particularly the young - have adopted such weird corporate language.
@@citizen3000 according to the dictionairy "content " is something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts: so i think it fits.
George out there doing the real journalism! Keep it up, man. I plan to start a career in game dev in the net few years, and when I do, I want to do everything I can to change the industry for the better, but I can't do it alone, and just getting this information out there is such an important step to making game dev a livable career again. Thank you!
Someone who works in QA myself it is definitely a environment you have to stand out in to get anywhere. I worked for Sony but left for another studio due to an increase in pay. Although Sony taught me a lot of things and enhanced my experience in the job sector it was a place where you had to stand out of a crowd of 100, and even then promotion was not guaranteed. Senior roles appeared once or twice a year and could be anywhere from 3 to 1 spaces that would needed filling out of 100s of internal and external application. A lot of staff where promoted due to being close friends, even some women where hired even though they had only been in QA for 8 months solely down to a lack of women in higher up roles. I knew a tester who is still there and had been there since 2012 literally earning £14,000 a year and in that time had trained staff, worked with devs, created endless testing strategies and even created automation testing and still wasnt offered any form of increased pay. If you can find the right place, work hard and have the right attitude its somewhere you can definitely succeed in.
No it isnt. These companies hire low skilled workers at minimum wage and don't want them using the time they are getting paid for talking to full time employees who are busy etc. These are literally fucking teenagers getting given an easy job that requires no back breaking labor, pays for overtime, and is extremely flexible. Yet superbunnyhop wants them to be treated like google front end developers? This is literally the equiv of getting a mcdonalds job but in gaming/tech. Is the next video going to argue that fast food staff should be treated the same as 4star chefs or restaurant managers? This is one of the dumbest videos ive seen in a long time.
I live in Redmond and so a lot of my friends have worked for or still do work for Nintendo and Microsoft as contract testers and customer service, and I cannot begin to recite all the horror stories. So many of them have been worried about losing the roof over their heads because they're put on their multi-month break. Hell, some of them get fired immediately after returning because the contract company felt they could get away with less people. It's an absolute nightmare for my friends, especially when the ACTUAL companies this work is going to is so reluctant to hire on full-time staff for ANY position.
Great video. I worked outsourced QA as a contractor for a large publisher for 3 years - and absolutely everything George said in this video is true. Honestly it's three years of my life I wish I could get back. I poured my heart and soul into testing some of the games I was on, and in turn I was paid peanuts, had managers try to intimidate me into taking overtime,and put on 3-month "furlough" periods where I could not reapply (so the agency didn't have to give us benefits). The atmosphere was oppressive. As George stated, testers were instructed NOT to talk to developers. I actually said "Fuck that rule" and cultivated a friendly relationship with one of the lead software engineers on a title I was on - a relationship that persists to this day. The engineer himself sent an e-mail to my management THANKING ME for the feedback I was giving. Many management protocols were stupid and inefficient, and challenging them as a lowly tester would go nowhere. In an extremely draconian measure, internet access was limited for testers on my final contract (of course, it wasn't limited for the managers), so we sometimes couldn't do basic fact checking on titles we were working on. I'm not joking. At one point they BANNED RUclips. RUclips is a tremendous educational resource, especially if you're working on a game that is supposed to emulate something in the real world (a sport for instance). Basically, they treated us like expendable peons and restricted our behaviors to an absurd degree. It was miserable. I ended up getting fired for arriving 1 minute "late" (it wasn't late according to the actual rules that were in writing, but the manager got his way) after I'd had surgery on my knee and couldn't move around as fast. Like, FIRED (my first and only time) for arriving a minute late due to a knee injury after pouring my heart and soul into that place & those games for shit pay and even worse managerial treatment, for three years. Today, years later, I'm GLAD I got fired. I now work at a laid-back IT company that gives me complete autonomy and pays me nearly double what I was making doing QA. I was so torn up about getting fired because I've loved video games all my life, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The sad reality is that outsourced publisher QA is a farm, and you, the employee, are the cow. You are there to be milked for your labor. That's how they see testers. Not as people, with ideas to offer or as individuals with unique ways to enhance the company. No, you are slave #231929. You do what you're told and arrive to work every day on time, up to the minute, or you're done. They don't give a shit about your passion for video games, and in fact these companies prey upon people who are the most passionate. Because if you are very passionate about what you're doing (or what you THINK you're doing), you're going to be willing to endure low pay, poor treatment, bad hours, disrespectful managers, etc. About the bug quotas - yes we had those. This resulted in people looking for the most nit-picky issues they could find, just to say they found a bug... instead of actually playing the game and putting thought into what they were doing. Both things George said about this is correct - you'd have some people who would "steal" bugs and you'd have some people who would find their "bugs for the day" and then just chill and do nothing because they didn't have to. Quality didn't matter, quantity did. George actually made me remember one instance where I had made friends with a new tester. He was awesome at Street Fighter, especially Street Fighter 3. He showed me a compilation he'd made with Dudley, of him absolutely beasting on people online. Dude was absurdly good and also really intelligent. But he got put onto a BORING project with me, and the game happened to be a genre neither of us had any remote interest in (not a fighting game, not competitive, etc... it's a game made for middle-aged housewives, but I won't elaborate in case of NDA). Anyways, I felt bad for this guy because he was struggling to find bugs on this game. So I actually GAVE him some of my bugs. Meaning if our bug quota was 7, I would give him any additional bugs I found after that. So there you have the whole bug quota economy. You had the bug lords who got their quota and then chilled and were lazy. You had the bug thieves. And then you had the bug donors. If anyone reading this is in outsourced QA, you need to get out. You're wasting your life for people who do not care about you. Now, on-site QA with the developers, I am told, is different. There, you're actually with developers, in a generally more creative and welcoming atmosphere. I have visited a dev studio and the atmosphere was so much different and better than the outsourced QA place. Everyone was friendly and were concerned with making cool things, not micro-managing other people into the grave. So if you can work on-site do it. But do not farm yourself to oursourced / contractor QA. It's a sugar-coated poison apple.
George is the real MVP. Seriously though, thank you for making this video. I had always heard things about QA, but hearing you put it out there in such a concise and detailed manner was incredibly interesting and illuminating. And I can tell you really care about the issue. Keep on keeping on man. I'm always psyched to see a new Super Bunnyhop video.
Really appreciate you actually doing journalism instead of advertising games that are coming out soon. I’m really sick of most game journalism and I work electronics assembly so this mirrors my experience almost to a T.
Wow. This video gave me flashbacks of the years I spent as a QA tester - both publisher and dev side. Dev was definitely better but we had the “can’t speak directly to the devs” and eventually “can’t attend parties” rules in place which was extremely frustrating and demoralizing.
I work as a security guard and honestly how you described "only haaving livable pay after working insane overtime" is accurate for it too. I currently work around acid tanks and heavy machinery for around 7.80 an hour (the minimum wage where I live is 7.25) and the only way you get paid "decently" (on the low end of decent for around here) is to work 60+hours a week So I can totally relate to this
Jasen Effendy off the top of my head: - seasonal hiring so they’ll get about 50-100 QA people on short term contracts in the summer to help push out FIFA and then let go of those people after 2-4 months - QA woman working along side the devs for some wii shovel ware was told to “know your place” by HR after putting out a dev spelling mistake in a document and then sent back to the pit where she was let go after - no party invites or access to any facility that they had to offer due to the nature of not being a “real” EA employee - a lot of what I call “mafia implication” as a way to get you to do things to keep working. My fave being “well we legally can’t force you to do overtime...” - rampant sexual harassment Keep in mind this is by design by EA as QA was handled by a third party called at that time VMC/Volt so any thing bad that happened could be hand waved away by EA
Anonymous User 3rd party company handles QA work hence if things go wrong EA can simply throw the 3rd party company under the bus and call it a day. EA would probably still use said 3rd party company after the heat goes down to save cost Remember that whole EA spouse that was circling around a decadge ago? EA didn't fire those people directly the cause of those problems, they simply moved them to our location as those people still saved a lot of money for EA
As someone else mentioned, portfolios can be amazing in industries like programming and engineering. It's a lot better to be able to say "I made xxx, here it is!" rather than "yup I took all the required classes and graduated". Maybe some of your current school projects could be spun into something bigger that could be a portfolio piece?
thanks all for the tips but these are all things discussed about and put into practice at my uni. Still, it dosnt change the fact that it would make one scared about going into the industry.
I recently expressed my desire to a game developer friend that I'd like to try myself out at his company as a game tester. What he told me was pretty much EXACTLY what you're talking about. He was trying hard to dissuade me from applying, saying that he wouldn't want to see his friend suffer like he sees the testers suffering at his company. I was skeptical a bit. A day later i see this video. Thank you for confirming everything he said.
@@mileskay7566 My take on that is that people in positions as agents of the capitalist class are encouraged to dehumanize the people below them, rather than the less likely assertion that sociopaths naturally end up in these higher positions. Your environment is a more powerful influence on your behavior than most people realize...
@nothing to see here Untrue. Free markets move to align with human needs and desires for anyone with capital to trade, or labor/ services to offer in exchange for capital.
@@abeidiot I think it's the availabiliy of people. Loads of people want to work on games, and either don't know about all the downsides or are hoping to use it as a stepping stone. Having an abundance of new people willing to work for peanuts makes it easy for companies to treat people like trash. I'm just taking a wild stab in the dark on this, though. I don't know how many people want to be / are general software QA vs game QA.
As a programmer myself, I always saw games as a honeypot. Sure I love games, I play them with all my free time! It makes more sense to work the minimum number of hours in a more lucrative position (mostly business middleware) so I can maximize the amount of time I actually spend gaming. I have passion for what I do (and have spent a fair amount of time in QA myself... write your damn test scripts devs!) but it's a pretty obvious trap to "work your way up from the bottom" in gaming. If you have true talent or skill you will skip the line, for the 90% of the rest of us it's better to build your resume elsewhere then still jump the line in a sideways movement (medical software to gaming? sure!)
Plus, as a programmer you're likely going to take a 10-30% pay cut in the games industry; the entire industry pays lower than equivalent 'non-sexy' roles.
Yup, I used to want to be a game developer until I realized how badly game devs are treated compared to programmers in almost every other industry. As George referenced though, it is pretty incredible living in a world where you can solo develop a game (maybe contract out art and music), self publish, and if you get a little lucky and the game is good, make pretty impressive amounts of money. Hell I imagine indie devs are doing even better now if they're getting fat epic store paychecks to bring their games to that store exclusively
As a kid, I thought it would be a dream job to work in the game industry. Nowadays, I'm doing very well on my computer science studies and I'm even in a game project right now. But I have no plans of ever working in this toxic, broken s***hole of an industry. Every time you think it sunk to inhuman, borderline illegal lows, some other publisher goes "hold my beer". But that seems to happen to a lot of "fun/passion jobs". They get overrun by brilliant, incredibly talented workers, who make each other replacable and can't avoid ruining their own wages. In the end, I wonder if it wouldn't feel like any other job, with the downside that you can't do it as a hobby anymore. Plus the added downside that your employer has ungodly leverage over you. I'm sure I can get a better deal with my degree somewhere else. Anywhere, probably.
@@Sercil00 The most bizarre thing is, almost all of it is unnecessary, because the industry is making record levels of money year on year. The CEO's alone are are making hundreds of millions every year, there is so much money but it is being tightly restricted to only those at the top, whilst those at the bottom are wrung for as much work for the bare minimum. I don't think this video really goes into just how damaging these quotas are in minimum wage work, it is ruthless and there is often a scoreboard to show who is "winning" and who is "loosing", pitting colleagues against each other, with the single winner getting a tiny few dollars bonus incentive and the many many losers loosing shifts and their job over unrealisticly high quotas, all of which result in a toxic workplace environment where everyone is fighting to survive and hate those who are topping the quotas. In no way will those quotas be set low like this video suggests, they will be unrealistically high to terrify everyone into working as hard as possible.
Funny you mention that. I was a game dev major in college, but I always knew that I'd end up in a more computer science type of career path as a software engineer. As much as I may want to make games, I doubt studios hire college grads with no real portfolio to their name, and I doubt they'd pay as good as a more typical programming job would. Moreover, a standard programming job is more readily available and likely more stable. That said, non-game companies can use game dev - centric talent. I'll be working in Unreal to develop simulations for training how to fix hardware when the hardware itself is far too expensive to (purposely or otherwise) break. But yeah, I don't know anybody from my major that wanted to start in QA. Far better and more rewarding things to do.
Thanks for calling attention to these issues, George! You are a saint. Most of this stuff also applies to QA work in software companies in general. Especially the class divide and not being allowed to talk to developers. It's a really weird place to be in the hierarchy as you're in the lowest position and yet having to tell people what they did wrong/what to fix.
Here are a few related problems of the games industry: 1. Absurdly high employee turnover 2. Deficient pipelines for internal promotion 3. Tight production schedules that leave no time for training, mentoring or on-boarding 4. Low demand for junior level jobs 5. High offer for junior level employees 6. Nepotism 7. The QA to Dev hiring pipeline 8. QA perceived as "unimportant" or "lesser" work 9. QA workers largely falling in either the "unmotivated dumbass" or the "overqualified aspiring dev" categories Literally pick any of those, and its cause will also be on the list. It's a nightmare level vicious circle. My department's current dedicated Dev QA at work is a young woman with a degree in architecture AND a degree in game design. She couldn't get work so she went for QA hoping to eventually get promoted to a better position.
I work as a mobile app developer, and I can't imagine us (at least in my company) treating QA poorly. When we all work together and treat each other respectfully, communicating about work and just hanging out, everything just goes better and easier. If the QA person does not have a CS background we try to impart as much knowledge to them, so they can write up technical reports. There's no 'low-tier' QA guy who just does mechanical monkey work. Having disposable, temporary QA hires, who're poorly trained and need a lot of time to catch up to become productive and very soon after get disposed off, isn't even efficient. One dedicated, motivated and capable QA, who feels valued, will do a much better job than multiple disposable temps.
Man, and I feel so terrible (as a developer/architect) just not having time to check in that my QA teammate knows what she needs to know. Sometimes they're expected to just jump in and immediately start testing and delivering meaningful reports without actually understanding the systems they work with. Some companies just like to blast along with no documentation, to try to do way more than they're actually capable of doing in a quality driven way.
As a QA Tester myself you got it mostly spot on. I will say that the more nebulous outsourcing QA places are the ones based outside of the US, those get borderline sweatshop levels from what I hear. I know SBH was kinda memeing at the end but burning bridges is a terrible bit of advice. The games industry is a surprisingly small place, don't forget you're not just burning bridges with your bosses but all those spectating your exit and hearing about it for months afterwards. Don't make a decision for short-term satisfaction with long-term consequences.
And here I thought that last video was great. Personally speaking, this one was even better. Really appreciate the spotlight you're shining here, George.
@DressedInRags Yeah like you were saying, you can Google that specific pepe. That particular clown pepe has been a signal flag for 8chan and 4chan neo-nazi groups. It also has deep roots in the red-pill / Incel community.
@@JeanDeaux666 Communists aren't even evil in the slightest. It's true that if pure Communism were attempted with current technology, it would collapse due to human error (similar to how pure Capitalism becomes incredibly corrupt), but Communists are not evil, they do literally nothing to hurt you but stick to an idea. The problem arises when there's a person like Kim Il-Sung that doesn't know what Communism even is, or a person like Joseph Stalin (pretty handsome though let's be honest) who knows what it is, but manipulates it so that it benefits him. They then convince many that they are true Communists and that they should rise up, and as a result you get a totalitarian dictatorship. Most "Communists" throughout history aren't even Communists. Both Stalin and Kim Il-Sung were fascists in essence, but in more complex terms Stalin was a Stalinist (literally just a fascist socialist, or in other words a fancy fascist that pretends it's socialist) and Kim Il-Sung just wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Just please recognize what Communism actually is before stating how evil it is. I'm tired of the "hur hur have fun starving you disgusting communist" in response to sarcastic memes despite the fact that Communism doesn't even cause the starvation. If a purely Communist country were to form, it would just collapse from lack of voluntary labor or be invaded because nobody was doing anything. Maybe it would even survive a whole generation before someone thinks "Wait, I don't have to work!" and then they stop working. In today's society, Communism (which is a democracy by the way) would fall apart due to lack of voluntary labor. This could be fixed with automation which would result in no need for voluntary labor. The needs could be all that are automated and it would do decently but it would preferably have commodities automated as well. Alas, automation isn't as easy as 1 2 3, especially once you consider that the machines would degrade over time and that would have to either be fixed by more machines or by people. The part I really don't like about economics is that it assumes people are perfect. What it then does is it applies theoretical Capitalism with perfect people vs practiced Stalinism with actual people and acts surprised when the theoretical wins. On an equal playing field, all the ideologies suck and we have to find one that sucks the least. Communism results in collapse (hasn't been practiced but USSR was trying to become Communist after being screwed over by Stalin, although that's a bad example because it collapsed due to Gorbachev voluntarily changing the economy), Capitalism results in an unstable economy with a stagnated political system (You can see this in the US with lobbying that is direct and total corruption of the government. For example, Tax Free-Filing is not in practice only because of lobbyists), Fascism results in oppression (Not just of those that don't match up with the nationality of the leader, but eventually the leader will be replaced by someone who just is generally a bad person and hates everyone equally), Feudalism also results in oppression (and it just kinda sucks. You can see Feudalism in Medieval Europe and Feudal Japan), and Socialism is weird because there is not a single person on this Earth with a definition for it that everyone agrees with, but generally it results in a person convincing everyone else that they're the Jesus of the economy and then screwing everyone over (USSR with Lenin and Stalin, Korea with Kim Il-Sung, China with Mao Zedong, etc. Pretty much every "Communist" throughout history). I hope this came out as a coherent thought and I didn't go overboard. After all, I have nothing else to do.
I've done "playtesting" once and the leads basically told us that whatever good or bad points we brought up wouldn't matter because they were just trying to kill game breaking bugs before the deadline in two weeks. We were there for a few days in an ultimately useless focus group because protocol said that the "playtesting" checkbox needed to be checked off
I dreamt of being a developer or tester... Then I knew a guy that was a tester, for small game company though, and what he described me was hell, nothing short of eternal torment.
Yea while I've dabbled in development, I've always done my own bug testing. Had a buddy work for Bethesda and his job basically involved running into walls and as bad as Game Devs are treated, QA is treated even worse with little to no job security and constant lay offs as soon as the project is finished, while devs will often be kept on to work on post launch patches and possibly move on to a new game, QA is almost immediately fired. I agree with Unionizing game development including QA, but at long as there are naive dumb kids willing to do the job (and there's a lot of them) they're going to be treated like trash. There's not much demand for QA because the supply of candidates is so large and the barrier for entry so low. Simple supply and demand. Only way they're going to be ensured an ethical work environment is by unionizing or having every candidate grow a pair and not let themselves just be a cog in the machine. (Expecting nerds to grow a pair though is pretty hard, most nerds avoid confrontation)
As someone who is looking to enter the gaming industry and was recommended by my peers at Full Sail University to look into QA jobs as an entry point, I greatly appreciate this video. Thanks George.
"Limiting on-site Internet Access" Ohhh, I had a company like that. Really felt welcome there as an intern, I was working as an IT Support there for 8 and a half hours a day ( including break ) for no pay and they wouldn't even let me browse the internet.
Sad thing is, nowadays you can be hired as a Game Designer, and still never be able to work your way up to actually designing a game. I was lucky enough to design a couple of games at my first company, but outside of that the majority of my "game designer" work has composed of things like taking instructions through email from one person, Copying those instructions into an Excel Document, and then passing the excel document to a programmer. Oh and then there's all the times they made me Play Test games because the studios were too cheap to hire dedicated Testers. Wow, so basically I got hired as a game designer only to work my way down to testing lol.
Once again, a great video with excellent research. I only got to work a brief 3 month stint as a tester for a certain Japanese company and everything you mentioned was 100% true. Classism, low pay, second class citizen treatment, security patdowns to make sure we're not taking devices, monotonous work, no internet access and no way to move up. Never again would I work a job like that and I wouldn't recommend it. I'm still in the games industry but mainly in marketing.
This kind of QA policy extends to major non-gaming businesses as well. They crunch QA a few days before release in a brutal way. A whole quarter to develop some new features. Some delays. Mock-ups don't arrive. Additional delays. Suddenly you have four days to test something that is still subject to change before a production release.
>you're not allowed to unionize what? how did the US go from example of social rights that the world celebrates of may first to the government letting you know you don't get that right?
Es lo que hay No you can’t unionize as a CONTRACTOR. The reason why contractors can’t unionize is because they’re technically separate business entities that the other company is hiring for a service. So, somewhat ironically, if they were to unionize, they could potentially be breaking antitrust laws. In the eyes of the law, it’d be similar to if car part manufacturers all teamed up to raise the price of parts. And no, unions are legal, they do not simply ignore the law and exist anyway. My dad was in an electricians union, that was legal, and I couldn’t find anything outright banning unions. In fact if I remember my High School AP history class well enough, unions are protected by fed. law.
Unions are legal, just not encouraged, and companies will do a lot to discourage such practices, and reward its absence, especially in jobs designed to be expendable. While contractors can sometimes join unions, there's always been a legal battle going on questioning the validity and justification of such practices, considering contractors are more "outsourced work" than employees intentionally retained long-term.
The only thing preventing you from unionizing is people who are qualified and willing to do your job regardless of how bad it is. In other words, the more desperate people are for jobs and income, and the less qualification needed to perform the task, the harder it is to unionize. Which is why desperate poor people are really beneficial for the rich. As long as they don't get so desperate that they become willing to fight and die in numbers to change things. It's all about that balance, that perfect amount of desperation.
Worked for THQ QA at one point and they made sure you understood that if you got fired you would be blacklisted. They paid poorly and basically made a point of feeding off of some local colleges that had video game programs. If you didn't make real nice with the office manager and the dept supervisor you would be kept as a permanent contractor so they could fire you in a heartbeat instead of ever having a full shot
As a gamer, years ago I had been asked on occasion to get into game development or game testing. And I wouldn't, knowing that they'll likely be terrible jobs. Or at least I'd likely end up getting in one. Over all these years, let's just say nothing has made me regret that mindset.
Really amazing video, George! There are humans behind every product, videogames are no exception! Nonetheless it is really rare for someone to comment on it!
I've been telling people this for years. Don't become a school teacher, don't become a cop and lastly don't work for a video game company. (Don't move to California either)
Also i live in the poorest province in Canada and minimum wage is so much higher than California compared to cost of living. plus we got free healthcare so I don't have to worry about many expenses that I would if I just lived a bit south of the border.
Since I watched this video, i started a QA job at a Publisher, and while the info is correct, I've also been treated well and have not experienced anything that apparently occurs at these places. It's a blessing, but i know it's not the norm in the industry.
It's a thing for most industries. You have to know a guy or show outstanding skill to move up. The minute you do its classism. I've seen it. Hope to break the trend should I get the opportunity.
I don't understand why you would want such a separation between testers and developers. I can only imagine that both parties could greatly help each other to... help each other.
Worked at pre-collapse Majesco QA in early to mid 00s. Can confirm - was paid absolute peanuts, and worked crazy hours. Was able to work my way up to (almost) Associate Producer level by having good analytical skills, being interested in the development process, learning to use debug tools, and helping out with art, level design and 1st party certification on several projects. Applied for an art position at another company, and got an offer for more than double what I was being paid. Talked to then Majesco management to perhaps stay with the company if they increased my pay to somewhat livable level, and was told to not let the door hit my ass on the way out: )
Bringing up crunch and showing those examples of some of the biggest names doing it, I still can't believe Dan Houser spoke in a tone one could rightly consider "bragging" about the crunch he put Rockstar through. He was openly proud of how poorly managed his project was and how he was hurting people for it.
He was talking about his own working hours and not the rest of the team. Which were "only" working the standard 80 hours game devs work. And a lot of it came from shitty middle management that top people at Rockstar wasnt paying enough attention to or didnt care about. Theres more to articles than a headline y'know.
@@BlargleWargle Except for the part where he acted proud of putting his team through crunch, except for the part where his actual fuck up was claiming he doesnt force crunch on employees and people choose it. So yea, other than the premise of your comment and characterization of his statements...you were spot on.
I remember on a documentary they showed a girl who was a tester for metal gear and Hideo had her walk on every single possible surface of the entire game to make sure every single footstep sounded correct
Ages ago I worked as an engineer at a small studio of a major publisher, and the bug quota adversarial relationship was absolutely a thing. I really appreciated getting reproducible bugs from the testers; what I didn't appreciate was getting 100 separate open issues of the same bug on every possible scene in the game. But I also didn't know about the bug quotas at the time. There was also no direct communication between the devs and QA - but we weren't even in the same country, and all access was mediated by the damn issue tracker, which was designed to be as onerous as possible. There was no way to mark duplicates or to bulk-resolve a bunch of bugs based on having the same root cause, everything needed to be closed individually with a specific explanation of what was fixed. Life as a developer wasn't even that much better than it was for QA, either. Engineers regularly worked 100+-hour weeks, we were making $50K/year *salaried* (no overtime) - essentially the equivalent of $10/hour, when our studio was based in Manhattan, NY. The game's writers were working just as many hours but making half as much. And the spectre of being shitcanned at the end of each game was very real. Burnout and churn were major issues. I lasted 9 months.
Some misleading things in this video. QA doesn't usually "polish up" anything or fix bugs at all. QA finds and documents them. The developers fix them and send the bug documentation back. QA themselves are RARELY in the actual development tools.
I did some work as a tester for a certain American branch of a Japanese developer/publisher around 2012, not sure if I can disclose who tho so I won't name them; work is brutal and underpaid, although in my case I was more of an intern rather than a full time employee so I wasn't getting paid anyway but still, my co-workers at the time told me some horror stories about going overtime, not receiving enough compensation or outright not getting paid for months.
Worked at one of the QA companies listed, ShastaQA. Not a video game QA company. They do mostly business/commercial webapps. Normal hours, decent enough pay because they only have locations in low cost of living areas. Successfully jumped from there to a proper SD position elsewhere. Would recommend for the right person.
I just tweeted this out - excellent video! Never worked as a QA in Game Dev, but seen most of this in other sectors as well. "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose." - Alphose Carr
IT workplaces here in Maryland are famously harsh on ZeniMax QA testers when it comes to interviews. If the people interviewing you play video games, odds are, they're gonna roast you and view your tenure at a ZeniMax QA position as a stain on your career rather than actual work experience.
I work as a programmer in the AAA industry and let me tell you - good QA is invaluable and extremely underrated. I don't think my employer has paid more than $1 million for QA over the last 10 years, but we've lost upwards of $8 million due to errors that slipped past the testers. And those are just the losses we can measure objectively, there's plenty more that's difficult to approximate. Having low pay and extreme overtime has led to many mistakes on the testers' part. I don't understand why AAA companies gamble their money like that. If you're a tester looking for a job - ask for more money and walk away when companies don't want to bargain with you.
![How to Become a Game Tester? [Game QA tester]](/img/1.gif)
Can we just take a second to acknowledge that George is filming on a green screen and not using it as a green screen.
Time to meme this
It's not the first time. I'm pretty sure he did this in some earlier videos as well.
and it's all fucking out of focus
this is prime meme territory
I just like that he starts glowing with an unholy red/purple energy in the last minute of the video.
It's been nearly 20 years since I was doing game QA and it's kinda crazy how things really haven't changed (and in some cases gotten worse). For example: bug quotas were "kinda outdated and on their way out"... 20 years ago.
Just goes to show how greedy people and bad ideas always seem to mix together.
Considering I have a friend in a small (but large enough company to know better) whose employer still uses lines-of-code as a metric during annual performance reviews, these dumb ideas can stick around unreasonably long. Ironically, he doesn't want to leave that job; it's easy enough to game the system and look productive that he just spends most of his time goofing off.
If it makes you feel any better, I've been working QA at Blizzard Entertainment for 14 years and bug quotas have never been a thing.
Mostly, we joke about how dumb the concept is.
@Vercusgames What do you tell the people who have already took the plunge and are trying to get out?
I'm still not entirely sure what "bug quota" really means. I think I understand it, but I'm not sure. Is it a system where each QA member has to identify an arbitrary number of bugs and then report them by an arbitrary deadline? If that's what it is, then what happens if the current game build at that point just...really doesn't have a lot of bugs? Do all of the people in QA get shitcanned? That doesn't make a lick of sense. Why should QA be punished for the game developers finally getting around to making a mostly bug-free build, or at least a build with less bugs than the previous iteration? Isn't QA meant to make that happen for the developers? Why are they getting punished for that? Corporatism is fucking stupid. So fucking stupid.
I've always felt that QA needs to work as closely as possible with the actual developers because it just makes sense. Compartmentalization is useful up to a certain point, but eventually it becomes a serious problem and drags everything down with it. I can understand a publisher wanting to heavily micromanage and compartmentalize development staff and QA staff. They probably think "if we gave all these silly millennials access to things they need to do their job then maybe they'll leak something to the public!" On the other hand...maybe if the QA staff were treated fairly and equally to the rest of the staff they would feel less inclined to risk their job by doing something like that. Wow what a big shocker, the underpaid and overworked 20 something that is living with his or her parents while paying off college tuition decided to leak an experimental build of the game to the public. Gee I wonder why they did that, don't they want to keep their job!!???
This is why corporatism is fucking stupid.
George should put that Skillshare to use by learning how to turn the focus ring on his camera lens.
All joking aside this is a good-ass look into the most hidden dark side of this dogshit industry, thank you rabbit man.
Or learn to turn the focus from automatic to manual.
And also how to set white balance. His videos are well paced but goddamn the quality of his footage is distracting sometimes. Out of focus, poorly exposed, wrong white balance. At least it's something fixable.
he might also pick up on the fact that you're supposed to replace the greenscreen in post.
This became a jerk off
He has a camera with manual focus!?
What witchcraft is this!?!?
Ah, mobile phones huh. XD
I really miss the camera app on my nokia 520...
Because... Who knew manual controls would be useful with a camera...
oh, wait...
But no, I transitioned to a phone worth about 7 times as much, yet the experience of using the camera is infinitely crappier...
I've been working for a little while for Lionbridge, an outsourcing QA company. We're extremely well treated. 8 hours per day, no OT, no pressure, correct pay. We can even miss days without too much consequences.
The work is monotonous, yes, but the team cohesion makes it pleasant.
I haven't seen layoffs yet.
Of course, though, in 3rd party QA, you have ZERO hope of climbing the ladder, but most people here love their job anyway.
Edit : I forgot to mention. We even get paid for "standby", which corresponds to time when you're not assigned to a project and just fuck around in the office or on a computer.
me: I promise not to get political
me after 3 beers: *yelling about unions and slowly turning red*
I too am slowly turning communist
@Old World Blues And like most other things in the world, Unions still will be influenced by how well function the society around it is.
If Labor is underpaid, you will get a lot of weird greedy people in the union, that hopefully will use the collective bargaining for everyone instead of just stroking their ego or accepting bribes.
Unions are essentially a political platform that tries to do collective bargaining against corporations and enterprises, instead of allowing the individual to do that. Things like insurance, legal aid, and a few other benefits is what will generally allow them goodwill for their members.
Things like parallel investigations on accidents/death, or even having a place to start dumping evidence of management corruption is also something that will earn long term goodwill.
Unions aren't great, but an increasing body of evidence does still seem to suggest that not having one in your industry is detrimental to your working conditions, more often than not.
There is no 'right' answer.
We're stuck with the best options we have, even if objectively speaking, they're awful.
That capitalism sucks is not an argument for communism, but at the same time it's also not actually an argument in favour of capitalism either.
When all your options suck, the best you can do is choose the least sucky one...
But the moment something better actually shows up, the writing is on the wall for the existing systems...
... As happened multiple times over the past few thousand years...
@Old World Blues What country?
Unions has nothing to do with communism
Damn. I missed whatever outreach you did to get sources, but can corroborate pretty much everything you're saying here as I did publisher QA for about 5 years a decade ago at one of the companies I know you heard from other employees about based on the info you've been provided here. So, I'll just try to add a "fun" anecdote to add to the whole experience of hell that is QA (and when you do it for a bit you get a lot of . . . interesting stories of existential terror) and specifically the weird ass classism.
My first ever business trip was while I was still very new as a Junior QA Test Engineer/Analyst at Major Publisher QA in California. A game in dev for the launch of a brand new console cycle was in its uber crunch mode, and somewhere in the management chain at Major Publisher, it was decided that internal QA at the developer was a blocked pipeline, as there were only 2 testers in the internal QA department at the developer, while the team at the publisher had a staff of around 30 day shifters, a dozen night shifters and a half dozen skeleton screw shifters (because yes, at this particular time 24-hour testing was very much a thing, and yes during crunch you could float between all three shifts some days).
So I, along with a colleague were sent to the developer's HQ to work with the dev's QA team and thus the actual devs themselves in a 1-on-1 manner to try and find bugs in the very temporary builds made between the builds that normally get sent to publisher QA for full sweeps (I discovered later we were chosen because we were both very new hires not our particular skill levels, so our removal from networking opportunities to advance our careers or remembered by our supervisors to get a performance review required to get a raise at the publisher was not seen by either of us as a detriment - we only discovered how damaging this was in the long term at the publisher once we came back).
When we got to the state that the developers were in, my fellow lowly tester and I were treated to the most bizarre experience. Because upon arriving at the developer's studio (after standard hotel checking in, yadda yadda stuff) we were immediately ushered into the office of the president of the company for a chat with him, much to our surprise and shock. When we got into the room, the president of the dev's company came at both myself and my fellow lowly QA tester with a quick speech of utter contriteness for the project not being finished on time, promises to hit the deadline for sure and this whole bluster of niceties that only stopped when he must have registered the look of utter confusion that had to have been playing out on my and my colleague's face, when he finally asked us who we were exactly. We told him that basically, we were just extra grunts for the testing mill to help out - a favor from the publisher basically - but he had been under the impression that we were much more important producers on the project basically sent by the publisher to spy on the devs at first. There was a bit of minor embarrasment on his part but by the end of the day were would finally be assigned to the dev team to do the job we were sent there to do.
(This strange experience also led - entirely due to being in the president's office at the time - hearing from one of the dev team members talk to the President about withholding sending out future review copies to a particular gaming magazine in the future for not giving out as glowing a review as they wanted for the game we were working on, so uh, yeah, media blacklists are real as hell folks)
This led to the odd situation where our status went through the most rapid shift ever since we had started out at the dev house with a case of mistaken identity, were given this red carpet treatment introduction, then kicked back to the lowest position the company had within about a four-hour period (because we were working a full 10-hours that night, believe you me, jet lag or no jet lag). To getting to enjoy the "fun" of being told that we didn't get to partake in the dev team's free crunch lunch catering and had to procure our meals off site at a nearby strip mall fast food joint (literally got kicked out of a lunch line once it was discovered, like this was kindergarten all over again and the other kids found out we had cooties). To getting completely isolated and locked out of pretty much any meetings with anyone else on the dev team - or really, any personal interaction at all with our "betters" - other than our directly assigned superiors from then on after meeting the literal company president day one.
And the CRAZY thing . . . this was *still* a much better experience and job than it was at the Publisher QA offices. By like, a 1000%. Because at Dev QA you may have gotten shunned and separated into a tiny little corner of the studio (we got to know the two other full-time testers there quite well, really nice dudes, in our little tester ghetto) but we did actually get to directly interface with the developers enough to build rapport, trust, and some level of working respect over time . . . which NEVER happens in publisher QA since it's all so impersonal and you have bunch of layers of bosses between you and the actual folks doing the actual coding and art for the game (since every bug has to go through like, 3-4 layers of approval before it can or will get addressed). We got our own actual cubicles instead of being crammed into folding tables like at the Publisher HQ, and even though we were kicked out of the lunch room for the first couple weeks and not allowed to eat with the cool kids in the cafeteria, by week three they had calmed down enough that we could at least bring our lunches to the cafeteria and eat with them, and honestly, our small but agile little team of testers was working really effectively since we didn't have to wait long periods for build approvals and printing like at the publisher HQ. We even had access to some basic QA automation tools and more advanced software I was never exposed to in the California home offices.
So yeah, the difference between Publisher QA and Developer QA is super real. The Classism is real. The horrible working conditions (in comparison to other positions in the industry - obviously this isn't like, an actual sweatshop) are real. The absurdity of trying to live in a high cost of living city on this rate of pay is real (I lived with two fellow testers in a very cheap apartment in a ghetto part of LA County to make it work, but there were some extreme examples, like this pair of brothers who commuted something like 50 miles every single morning at 3-4 am). The arrested development of your career until you realize that you have to move on after wasting half a decade of your life is real. It's all true. All of it.
SonofaGlitch Why does this remind me of R* San Diego during RDR development back in the day lol
Very interesting story, too bad you killed it with "must of" :( I know most people use contractions and must've sounds a little like must of, but... do people really never wonder what they are saying? never use written language? Really never encountered modal + have + past participle?
@lonely bathroom oh, go screw yourself, you garbage person. people like you are the reason crap like this even exists.
That is all just so astoundingly petty and incompetent.
Apparently these development and publisher houses really are like kindergarten, considering how they all behave.
Get in touch with Jim Sterling or Yong Yea I think they're looking for QA testers spilling the goods for a future video too.
The ending was glorious comrade.
QA Testers unite!
QA Testers rise!
SBH breadtube confirmed
I sorta was a part of this in 2009. An "assignment" of stocking the background for large game presentations during E3. A fair sized group encountered some reporters (who were intentionally segregated) started doing some unconventional gameplay... It was good fun for 20 seconds or so before the lead ran in shouting for who started.
Anyway to the meat of the video, yeah, you pretty much nailed it on the head. Mine was even so far as to say that the conveniently located break room on the second floor was only for *company* employees. Along with the onsite gym, nearby parking, and outdoor street events.
Worst offense for me personally was the promise of a new assignment... For two years while checking in bi-weekly religiously.
Absolute comrade George calling for wildcat strikes.
#ourguy
A specter is haunting game development- The specter of Red George
Bread tube Bread tube!
"Homelessness, starvation, and debt (death?) are all their own enforcement mechanisms" ....brilliant!
Holy crap though.
As an amateur game developer (going on 20 years now - I do it for my own amusement), the idea that my QA testers aren't allowed to talk to me is abhorrent.
Not even because it just seems kinda sick, but just on a practical level.
Sometimes the best way to understand what a tester is complaining about (after all, I have to fix whatever they find, usually), is to, you know.
Talk to them?
An environment that bans that is not going to be very productive in the slightest...
In my experience, this (and other things in the video) are ironically forced by the QA team themselves, and not other departments
Here’s the thing you aren’t considering:
You CARE. These “AAA” publishers don’t.
Welcome to working for large companies in everything, where politics and hierarchy rule above all else, levels and layers of departmental bosses and managers demanding endless updates and reports towards progress and meeting targets, in a system of rigorously enforced fear and loathing for each layer to ensure everyone knows their place and should not dare challenge those above who could make their working life a misery.
@@NathanCassidy721 Lol. Yeah, there is that.
Corporate politics are so depressing...
It seems like some "divide and conquer" tactics are at play here. Whether they are conscious or systemic I'm not sure. If the "crucial"/rare employees talk to and make friends with the "expendable" ones, there may be greater support for not treating the "expendable" employees as, well, expendable. Further, instead of fighting each other they can team up and actually negotiate getting proper pay for the value they're generating.
Fun Fact: Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe in Liverpool UK used to sack their First Party Quality Assurance testers for two weeks on the eve of them working for the company for two years in order to skirt around employment law in the United Kingdom (and that was when they were feeling kind) ... Until April 2018, when they moved all of the contractors over to being employed by an outside agency, but still working in the same building as everyone else. As long as they are employed by an outside employment agency SIEE does not have to adhere to the same employment laws, meaning they can just employ them as non-permanent staff in perpetuity without suffering repercussions if they sack them after two years of contiguous employment.
So for them to be employed by the outside employment agency, they have to pay that agency money on top of what they are paying the workers in wages. For those keeping up, this means they are literally paying out more money to deny workers their rights and dodge UK employment laws.
Note when I said "when they were feeling kind"? They would also sack workers who had booked off a week on holiday at Xmas for a few weeks just to wipe out their holiday allowance, and then re-employ them a few weeks later on the hope they would feel the need to crunch over Xmas to make up for the weeks they were umemployed.
Not to mention the time they did a fuckload of lay-offs on Xmas Eve 2014, that was a hoot! ... Except it wasn't nice in the slightest.
I hear down the grapevine that workers are being mispaid by the external employment agency on a regular basis, and that not much has improved.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more stories where this came from.
Flawless transition to the sponsor, George.
I remember working as a dev and getting publisher QA reports that would make me rage. We had no idea they had a quota and we'd get things like manipulated videos or images to report bugs that didn't even exist.
Ultimately it made us waste a lot of time chasing a fake problem instead of solving the real ones, and I bet it made many QA people anxious.
I'm so glad the desk came back and was still more in focus than you
he's got his priorities straight
Gaze upon his desk, take in all of it's beauty. Magical, isn't it?
This video is a godsend. I've recently come out of a QA job a few months ago after being treated like complete shite for over a year. You weren't allowed to talk in the office - not even ask how someone's weekend was because that's "not work related" and should be saved for break times. We were expendable, and were let go if someone in the "bubble buddies club" didn't like you. The hierarchy system was shocking, if you unintentionally annoyed the wrong person - say goodbye to any potential progression because you may have offended someone by saying the word "lame".
I've managed to land a job as an Environment Artist for an indie company though, and goddamn does it feel good to stick it to em'. I'm trying to get some of my other QA pals to come join the company, as they deserve so much better.
Thank you for this video.
"... game developer you know and love..."
shows Epic, Gearbox and Bungie..
Valve lol
Epic was good when they made gears of war. So was bungie when they made halo.
Gearbox too, when they made awesome Half-Life expansions. But those days are gone :(
LiDeBr it’s not Gearbox‘s fault that it has to deal with Randy as a CEO
@@PancakemonsterFO4 True.
Great vid.
Few years ago I moved from games QA to business QA and it was the best decision in my life. Work is only slightly more boring, but my quality of life and salary both skyrocketed.
Gaming industry is currently a hellhole. Exploitation of workers is a norm, even something to be expected. And what's worse, many people justify their own exploitation with "at least I'm doing what I love". Too bad you can't eat thar love, or use it to pay the bills.
I work at a small software company as a full stack developer.
I can't really speak for the game industry.
We have one QA guy in our team, he's involved in the development cycle, tests almost everything and even does some sales stuff.
The bugs that guy finds helps me and my fellow developers a lot, i'd go as far as to say he is essential.
Good QA is essential for any developer, not being able to talk to QA people and discuss the things they find is bad practice and leads to bad software.
sounds coherent
Hoy, I work for a third-party QA outsourcer. I used to be a QA Tester, now i'm in their HR department (of note, my part of the HR Department is 90% ex-testers.).
Maybe i was lucky, but honestly, this made me feel like i was well treated. I started on a AA episodic title, moved to a AAA title with some very softly enforced crunch. I then moved on to an evergreen project for a couple years before ending up in HR. I always had a livable (albeit very low) wage (And i am pretty frugal)... I agree that most people can't really climb up the ladder, the senior positions open up very rarely and sporadically, as do test lead or project manager positions. That said, once you were through asa senior, it became much easier to climb up.
Again, i understand i was exceedingly lucky for being indispensable on long-term projects, but i believe a good 60% of the tester positions during the year are on evergreen or very-very long term projects... So the contract breaks aren't that abundant.
Just wanted to echo what was said at the beginning and end, though. if you have something better to do, do it, QA is not a good ladder up, especially not third party QA. I literally had nothing better i could get due to various reasons... that's why i stuck it out despite knowing i could do better. like, theoretically. The only ONLY possible way from third party QA to game design is, like..... Being sent to a client for a project and being kept there, which is super rare because clients are not supposed to poach testers from the 3rd party companies.
great video, A+ research, i wish i knew about it before as i would have contributed.
PS: The video also is making me want to get back to work on my games.
I hope this channel never stops producing content. Consistently so so good.
George doesn't produce 'content'. He makes videos. I find it very strange that so many people - particularly the young - have adopted such weird corporate language.
@@citizen3000 yeah goergesocks are a video.
@@citizen3000 #mental_illness
@@citizen3000 according to the dictionairy "content " is something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts: so i think it fits.
George out there doing the real journalism! Keep it up, man. I plan to start a career in game dev in the net few years, and when I do, I want to do everything I can to change the industry for the better, but I can't do it alone, and just getting this information out there is such an important step to making game dev a livable career again. Thank you!
Literally just got finished watching the unionization video, your timing is impeccable
Someone who works in QA myself it is definitely a environment you have to stand out in to get anywhere. I worked for Sony but left for another studio due to an increase in pay. Although Sony taught me a lot of things and enhanced my experience in the job sector it was a place where you had to stand out of a crowd of 100, and even then promotion was not guaranteed. Senior roles appeared once or twice a year and could be anywhere from 3 to 1 spaces that would needed filling out of 100s of internal and external application. A lot of staff where promoted due to being close friends, even some women where hired even though they had only been in QA for 8 months solely down to a lack of women in higher up roles. I knew a tester who is still there and had been there since 2012 literally earning £14,000 a year and in that time had trained staff, worked with devs, created endless testing strategies and even created automation testing and still wasnt offered any form of increased pay. If you can find the right place, work hard and have the right attitude its somewhere you can definitely succeed in.
Yeah, Sony FPQA in Liverpool is famous country-wide for being a sausage-sucking contest in order to get ahead.
Hands down smoothest Skillshare sponsorship message on RUclips!
Also, depressing video :(
If you like smooth ads, you should watch Jay foreman
@@biocode4478 Or linus tech tips
No it isnt. These companies hire low skilled workers at minimum wage and don't want them using the time they are getting paid for talking to full time employees who are busy etc.
These are literally fucking teenagers getting given an easy job that requires no back breaking labor, pays for overtime, and is extremely flexible. Yet superbunnyhop wants them to be treated like google front end developers?
This is literally the equiv of getting a mcdonalds job but in gaming/tech. Is the next video going to argue that fast food staff should be treated the same as 4star chefs or restaurant managers?
This is one of the dumbest videos ive seen in a long time.
LegalEagle had a really good one on his video about whether or not a president can pardon himself.
It was smooth because it was out-of-focus
I live in Redmond and so a lot of my friends have worked for or still do work for Nintendo and Microsoft as contract testers and customer service, and I cannot begin to recite all the horror stories. So many of them have been worried about losing the roof over their heads because they're put on their multi-month break. Hell, some of them get fired immediately after returning because the contract company felt they could get away with less people. It's an absolute nightmare for my friends, especially when the ACTUAL companies this work is going to is so reluctant to hire on full-time staff for ANY position.
George showing up for labour rights!
Thank you for not disrespecting your viewers with that ad. The way you handled it was spot on.
Good work as always. Keep on giving the gaming industry the ol' Investigative Journalism.
Great video. I worked outsourced QA as a contractor for a large publisher for 3 years - and absolutely everything George said in this video is true. Honestly it's three years of my life I wish I could get back. I poured my heart and soul into testing some of the games I was on, and in turn I was paid peanuts, had managers try to intimidate me into taking overtime,and put on 3-month "furlough" periods where I could not reapply (so the agency didn't have to give us benefits).
The atmosphere was oppressive. As George stated, testers were instructed NOT to talk to developers. I actually said "Fuck that rule" and cultivated a friendly relationship with one of the lead software engineers on a title I was on - a relationship that persists to this day. The engineer himself sent an e-mail to my management THANKING ME for the feedback I was giving. Many management protocols were stupid and inefficient, and challenging them as a lowly tester would go nowhere. In an extremely draconian measure, internet access was limited for testers on my final contract (of course, it wasn't limited for the managers), so we sometimes couldn't do basic fact checking on titles we were working on. I'm not joking. At one point they BANNED RUclips. RUclips is a tremendous educational resource, especially if you're working on a game that is supposed to emulate something in the real world (a sport for instance).
Basically, they treated us like expendable peons and restricted our behaviors to an absurd degree. It was miserable. I ended up getting fired for arriving 1 minute "late" (it wasn't late according to the actual rules that were in writing, but the manager got his way) after I'd had surgery on my knee and couldn't move around as fast. Like, FIRED (my first and only time) for arriving a minute late due to a knee injury after pouring my heart and soul into that place & those games for shit pay and even worse managerial treatment, for three years.
Today, years later, I'm GLAD I got fired. I now work at a laid-back IT company that gives me complete autonomy and pays me nearly double what I was making doing QA. I was so torn up about getting fired because I've loved video games all my life, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The sad reality is that outsourced publisher QA is a farm, and you, the employee, are the cow. You are there to be milked for your labor. That's how they see testers. Not as people, with ideas to offer or as individuals with unique ways to enhance the company. No, you are slave #231929. You do what you're told and arrive to work every day on time, up to the minute, or you're done. They don't give a shit about your passion for video games, and in fact these companies prey upon people who are the most passionate. Because if you are very passionate about what you're doing (or what you THINK you're doing), you're going to be willing to endure low pay, poor treatment, bad hours, disrespectful managers, etc.
About the bug quotas - yes we had those. This resulted in people looking for the most nit-picky issues they could find, just to say they found a bug... instead of actually playing the game and putting thought into what they were doing. Both things George said about this is correct - you'd have some people who would "steal" bugs and you'd have some people who would find their "bugs for the day" and then just chill and do nothing because they didn't have to. Quality didn't matter, quantity did. George actually made me remember one instance where I had made friends with a new tester. He was awesome at Street Fighter, especially Street Fighter 3. He showed me a compilation he'd made with Dudley, of him absolutely beasting on people online. Dude was absurdly good and also really intelligent. But he got put onto a BORING project with me, and the game happened to be a genre neither of us had any remote interest in (not a fighting game, not competitive, etc... it's a game made for middle-aged housewives, but I won't elaborate in case of NDA). Anyways, I felt bad for this guy because he was struggling to find bugs on this game. So I actually GAVE him some of my bugs. Meaning if our bug quota was 7, I would give him any additional bugs I found after that. So there you have the whole bug quota economy. You had the bug lords who got their quota and then chilled and were lazy. You had the bug thieves. And then you had the bug donors.
If anyone reading this is in outsourced QA, you need to get out. You're wasting your life for people who do not care about you.
Now, on-site QA with the developers, I am told, is different. There, you're actually with developers, in a generally more creative and welcoming atmosphere. I have visited a dev studio and the atmosphere was so much different and better than the outsourced QA place. Everyone was friendly and were concerned with making cool things, not micro-managing other people into the grave. So if you can work on-site do it. But do not farm yourself to oursourced / contractor QA. It's a sugar-coated poison apple.
I feel like the QAs are a specimen that you just tested and examined, and now this is your report
George is the real MVP.
Seriously though, thank you for making this video. I had always heard things about QA, but hearing you put it out there in such a concise and detailed manner was incredibly interesting and illuminating.
And I can tell you really care about the issue.
Keep on keeping on man. I'm always psyched to see a new Super Bunnyhop video.
Consistently blown away by your professionalism and subject matter. George ur an amazing journalist.
Really appreciate you actually doing journalism instead of advertising games that are coming out soon. I’m really sick of most game journalism and I work electronics assembly so this mirrors my experience almost to a T.
Seriously, the world needs more people like you. 🎩 Sir
Guys with comb-overs?
@@vonclaren1 If that goes hand in hand with the attitude, then yes.
@@Euer_Hochwuergen ok then, comb it over I guess
It's very distracting
@@vonclaren1 so, you couldn't even hear what he said?
@@Euer_Hochwuergen Only when his head wasn't on screen
Otherwise I was mesmerised by the comb-over
Wow. This video gave me flashbacks of the years I spent as a QA tester - both publisher and dev side. Dev was definitely better but we had the “can’t speak directly to the devs” and eventually “can’t attend parties” rules in place which was extremely frustrating and demoralizing.
"Burn those bridges !"
George sure knows how to start a revolution.
I work as a security guard and honestly how you described "only haaving livable pay after working insane overtime" is accurate for it too.
I currently work around acid tanks and heavy machinery for around 7.80 an hour (the minimum wage where I live is 7.25) and the only way you get paid "decently" (on the low end of decent for around here) is to work 60+hours a week
So I can totally relate to this
"Classism (Uncommon)"
i wish
Thanks for making this video as I used to do QA for EA games
Those were long and crushing days
Can you tell us some stories about your time there?
Jasen Effendy off the top of my head:
- seasonal hiring so they’ll get about 50-100 QA people on short term contracts in the summer to help push out FIFA and then let go of those people after 2-4 months
- QA woman working along side the devs for some wii shovel ware was told to “know your place” by HR after putting out a dev spelling mistake in a document and then sent back to the pit where she was let go after
- no party invites or access to any facility that they had to offer due to the nature of not being a “real” EA employee
- a lot of what I call “mafia implication” as a way to get you to do things to keep working. My fave being “well we legally can’t force you to do overtime...”
- rampant sexual harassment
Keep in mind this is by design by EA as QA was handled by a third party called at that time VMC/Volt so any thing bad that happened could be hand waved away by EA
Anonymous User 3rd party company handles QA work hence if things go wrong EA can simply throw the 3rd party company under the bus and call it a day.
EA would probably still use said 3rd party company after the heat goes down to save cost
Remember that whole EA spouse that was circling around a decadge ago? EA didn't fire those people directly the cause of those problems, they simply moved them to our location as those people still saved a lot of money for EA
yay! another video to make me anxious about being a game design major
Shit like this makes me anxious to buy games as a regular consumer. I can't imagine what it's like to actually work in this industry
fun fact students can unionize too. get the practice in early
its all about your connections and maybe your portfolio
As someone else mentioned, portfolios can be amazing in industries like programming and engineering. It's a lot better to be able to say "I made xxx, here it is!" rather than "yup I took all the required classes and graduated". Maybe some of your current school projects could be spun into something bigger that could be a portfolio piece?
thanks all for the tips but these are all things discussed about and put into practice at my uni. Still, it dosnt change the fact that it would make one scared about going into the industry.
That's some amazing sarcasm at 9:04 . Solid work George. Very subtle.
I love you man! Truly, deeply! You're doing good work!
I recently expressed my desire to a game developer friend that I'd like to try myself out at his company as a game tester. What he told me was pretty much EXACTLY what you're talking about. He was trying hard to dissuade me from applying, saying that he wouldn't want to see his friend suffer like he sees the testers suffering at his company. I was skeptical a bit. A day later i see this video. Thank you for confirming everything he said.
Makes me sick that sociopaths are managers and employers and treat people so poorly.
This is not the world we should be living in.
History repeats itself. Over, and over, and over.....
Lol, so you advocate that sociopaths be second-rate citizens banned from having jobs? (I get what you mean, but your choice of words is dangerous)
@@mileskay7566 My take on that is that people in positions as agents of the capitalist class are encouraged to dehumanize the people below them, rather than the less likely assertion that sociopaths naturally end up in these higher positions.
Your environment is a more powerful influence on your behavior than most people realize...
@nothing to see here but the money is an illusion. Most of it is accounting gimmicks.
@nothing to see here
Untrue. Free markets move to align with human needs and desires for anyone with capital to trade, or labor/ services to offer in exchange for capital.
I was a game tester for 5 years and let me tell you we don't get no respect, no respect at all.
[Dangerfield intensifies]
@@abeidiot I think it's the availabiliy of people. Loads of people want to work on games, and either don't know about all the downsides or are hoping to use it as a stepping stone. Having an abundance of new people willing to work for peanuts makes it easy for companies to treat people like trash.
I'm just taking a wild stab in the dark on this, though. I don't know how many people want to be / are general software QA vs game QA.
You just used a double negative.
As a programmer myself, I always saw games as a honeypot. Sure I love games, I play them with all my free time! It makes more sense to work the minimum number of hours in a more lucrative position (mostly business middleware) so I can maximize the amount of time I actually spend gaming. I have passion for what I do (and have spent a fair amount of time in QA myself... write your damn test scripts devs!) but it's a pretty obvious trap to "work your way up from the bottom" in gaming. If you have true talent or skill you will skip the line, for the 90% of the rest of us it's better to build your resume elsewhere then still jump the line in a sideways movement (medical software to gaming? sure!)
Plus, as a programmer you're likely going to take a 10-30% pay cut in the games industry; the entire industry pays lower than equivalent 'non-sexy' roles.
Yup, I used to want to be a game developer until I realized how badly game devs are treated compared to programmers in almost every other industry.
As George referenced though, it is pretty incredible living in a world where you can solo develop a game (maybe contract out art and music), self publish, and if you get a little lucky and the game is good, make pretty impressive amounts of money. Hell I imagine indie devs are doing even better now if they're getting fat epic store paychecks to bring their games to that store exclusively
As a kid, I thought it would be a dream job to work in the game industry.
Nowadays, I'm doing very well on my computer science studies and I'm even in a game project right now. But I have no plans of ever working in this toxic, broken s***hole of an industry. Every time you think it sunk to inhuman, borderline illegal lows, some other publisher goes "hold my beer".
But that seems to happen to a lot of "fun/passion jobs". They get overrun by brilliant, incredibly talented workers, who make each other replacable and can't avoid ruining their own wages. In the end, I wonder if it wouldn't feel like any other job, with the downside that you can't do it as a hobby anymore. Plus the added downside that your employer has ungodly leverage over you.
I'm sure I can get a better deal with my degree somewhere else. Anywhere, probably.
@@Sercil00 The most bizarre thing is, almost all of it is unnecessary, because the industry is making record levels of money year on year. The CEO's alone are are making hundreds of millions every year, there is so much money but it is being tightly restricted to only those at the top, whilst those at the bottom are wrung for as much work for the bare minimum. I don't think this video really goes into just how damaging these quotas are in minimum wage work, it is ruthless and there is often a scoreboard to show who is "winning" and who is "loosing", pitting colleagues against each other, with the single winner getting a tiny few dollars bonus incentive and the many many losers loosing shifts and their job over unrealisticly high quotas, all of which result in a toxic workplace environment where everyone is fighting to survive and hate those who are topping the quotas. In no way will those quotas be set low like this video suggests, they will be unrealistically high to terrify everyone into working as hard as possible.
Funny you mention that. I was a game dev major in college, but I always knew that I'd end up in a more computer science type of career path as a software engineer. As much as I may want to make games, I doubt studios hire college grads with no real portfolio to their name, and I doubt they'd pay as good as a more typical programming job would. Moreover, a standard programming job is more readily available and likely more stable.
That said, non-game companies can use game dev - centric talent. I'll be working in Unreal to develop simulations for training how to fix hardware when the hardware itself is far too expensive to (purposely or otherwise) break. But yeah, I don't know anybody from my major that wanted to start in QA. Far better and more rewarding things to do.
Thanks for calling attention to these issues, George! You are a saint.
Most of this stuff also applies to QA work in software companies in general.
Especially the class divide and not being allowed to talk to developers.
It's a really weird place to be in the hierarchy as you're in the lowest position
and yet having to tell people what they did wrong/what to fix.
I love you George. That ending was beautiful.
Here are a few related problems of the games industry:
1. Absurdly high employee turnover
2. Deficient pipelines for internal promotion
3. Tight production schedules that leave no time for training, mentoring or on-boarding
4. Low demand for junior level jobs
5. High offer for junior level employees
6. Nepotism
7. The QA to Dev hiring pipeline
8. QA perceived as "unimportant" or "lesser" work
9. QA workers largely falling in either the "unmotivated dumbass" or the "overqualified aspiring dev" categories
Literally pick any of those, and its cause will also be on the list. It's a nightmare level vicious circle.
My department's current dedicated Dev QA at work is a young woman with a degree in architecture AND a degree in game design. She couldn't get work so she went for QA hoping to eventually get promoted to a better position.
As a former QA that had these things happen, Thank you for this video. Finally people might believe us for a change.
I work as a mobile app developer, and I can't imagine us (at least in my company) treating QA poorly. When we all work together and treat each other respectfully, communicating about work and just hanging out, everything just goes better and easier. If the QA person does not have a CS background we try to impart as much knowledge to them, so they can write up technical reports. There's no 'low-tier' QA guy who just does mechanical monkey work. Having disposable, temporary QA hires, who're poorly trained and need a lot of time to catch up to become productive and very soon after get disposed off, isn't even efficient. One dedicated, motivated and capable QA, who feels valued, will do a much better job than multiple disposable temps.
Even the algorithm knows I'm in the contract break period..
Man, and I feel so terrible (as a developer/architect) just not having time to check in that my QA teammate knows what she needs to know.
Sometimes they're expected to just jump in and immediately start testing and delivering meaningful reports without actually understanding the systems they work with.
Some companies just like to blast along with no documentation, to try to do way more than they're actually capable of doing in a quality driven way.
As a QA Tester myself you got it mostly spot on. I will say that the more nebulous outsourcing QA places are the ones based outside of the US, those get borderline sweatshop levels from what I hear. I know SBH was kinda memeing at the end but burning bridges is a terrible bit of advice. The games industry is a surprisingly small place, don't forget you're not just burning bridges with your bosses but all those spectating your exit and hearing about it for months afterwards. Don't make a decision for short-term satisfaction with long-term consequences.
And here I thought that last video was great. Personally speaking, this one was even better. Really appreciate the spotlight you're shining here, George.
watching superbunnyhop is like watching breaking bad but Walter White slowly transforms into a communist instead of a drug kingpin
Communists are far more evil than drug lords.
@@JeanDeaux666 nice fascist dogwhistle in your profile pic
+baas
"fascist dogwhistle"
wow you guys are legitimately insane.
@DressedInRags
Yeah like you were saying, you can Google that specific pepe. That particular clown pepe has been a signal flag for 8chan and 4chan neo-nazi groups. It also has deep roots in the red-pill / Incel community.
@@JeanDeaux666 Communists aren't even evil in the slightest. It's true that if pure Communism were attempted with current technology, it would collapse due to human error (similar to how pure Capitalism becomes incredibly corrupt), but Communists are not evil, they do literally nothing to hurt you but stick to an idea.
The problem arises when there's a person like Kim Il-Sung that doesn't know what Communism even is, or a person like Joseph Stalin (pretty handsome though let's be honest) who knows what it is, but manipulates it so that it benefits him.
They then convince many that they are true Communists and that they should rise up, and as a result you get a totalitarian dictatorship. Most "Communists" throughout history aren't even Communists. Both Stalin and Kim Il-Sung were fascists in essence, but in more complex terms Stalin was a Stalinist (literally just a fascist socialist, or in other words a fancy fascist that pretends it's socialist) and Kim Il-Sung just wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.
Just please recognize what Communism actually is before stating how evil it is. I'm tired of the "hur hur have fun starving you disgusting communist" in response to sarcastic memes despite the fact that Communism doesn't even cause the starvation. If a purely Communist country were to form, it would just collapse from lack of voluntary labor or be invaded because nobody was doing anything. Maybe it would even survive a whole generation before someone thinks "Wait, I don't have to work!" and then they stop working.
In today's society, Communism (which is a democracy by the way) would fall apart due to lack of voluntary labor. This could be fixed with automation which would result in no need for voluntary labor. The needs could be all that are automated and it would do decently but it would preferably have commodities automated as well. Alas, automation isn't as easy as 1 2 3, especially once you consider that the machines would degrade over time and that would have to either be fixed by more machines or by people.
The part I really don't like about economics is that it assumes people are perfect. What it then does is it applies theoretical Capitalism with perfect people vs practiced Stalinism with actual people and acts surprised when the theoretical wins. On an equal playing field, all the ideologies suck and we have to find one that sucks the least. Communism results in collapse (hasn't been practiced but USSR was trying to become Communist after being screwed over by Stalin, although that's a bad example because it collapsed due to Gorbachev voluntarily changing the economy), Capitalism results in an unstable economy with a stagnated political system (You can see this in the US with lobbying that is direct and total corruption of the government. For example, Tax Free-Filing is not in practice only because of lobbyists), Fascism results in oppression (Not just of those that don't match up with the nationality of the leader, but eventually the leader will be replaced by someone who just is generally a bad person and hates everyone equally), Feudalism also results in oppression (and it just kinda sucks. You can see Feudalism in Medieval Europe and Feudal Japan), and Socialism is weird because there is not a single person on this Earth with a definition for it that everyone agrees with, but generally it results in a person convincing everyone else that they're the Jesus of the economy and then screwing everyone over (USSR with Lenin and Stalin, Korea with Kim Il-Sung, China with Mao Zedong, etc. Pretty much every "Communist" throughout history).
I hope this came out as a coherent thought and I didn't go overboard. After all, I have nothing else to do.
Good video. As a former Game Tester I can attest that this is 100% on point.
Thanks Bunnyhopper. I rate this a Noodle Prop / George.
Noodle prop, the highest accolades
I've done "playtesting" once and the leads basically told us that whatever good or bad points we brought up wouldn't matter because they were just trying to kill game breaking bugs before the deadline in two weeks. We were there for a few days in an ultimately useless focus group because protocol said that the "playtesting" checkbox needed to be checked off
I dreamt of being a developer or tester...
Then I knew a guy that was a tester, for small game company though, and what he described me was hell, nothing short of eternal torment.
Yea while I've dabbled in development, I've always done my own bug testing. Had a buddy work for Bethesda and his job basically involved running into walls and as bad as Game Devs are treated, QA is treated even worse with little to no job security and constant lay offs as soon as the project is finished, while devs will often be kept on to work on post launch patches and possibly move on to a new game, QA is almost immediately fired. I agree with Unionizing game development including QA, but at long as there are naive dumb kids willing to do the job (and there's a lot of them) they're going to be treated like trash. There's not much demand for QA because the supply of candidates is so large and the barrier for entry so low. Simple supply and demand. Only way they're going to be ensured an ethical work environment is by unionizing or having every candidate grow a pair and not let themselves just be a cog in the machine. (Expecting nerds to grow a pair though is pretty hard, most nerds avoid confrontation)
@@nokturnallex2160 so what we are supposed to do
@@nokturnallex2160 and what exactly is naive
As someone who is looking to enter the gaming industry and was recommended by my peers at Full Sail University to look into QA jobs as an entry point, I greatly appreciate this video. Thanks George.
Takes me back to Egoraptor on the Tester. Strange times
I remember when Egoraptor made good content.
“I didn’t realize you were such a big fan of dick!” -Egoraptor, Egorapture by Spazkid
Egoraptor? Damn it's been years since I've heard that name. Isn't he died or something?
RUclips happened
Egoraptor is a transphobe last i heard
"Limiting on-site Internet Access"
Ohhh, I had a company like that. Really felt welcome there as an intern, I was working as an IT Support there for 8 and a half hours a day ( including break ) for no pay and they wouldn't even let me browse the internet.
That what was explained as "senior QA" is actually a proper QA job. An QE - Quality Engineer, not a tester boy.
Sad thing is, nowadays you can be hired as a Game Designer, and still never be able to work your way up to actually designing a game. I was lucky enough to design a couple of games at my first company, but outside of that the majority of my "game designer" work has composed of things like taking instructions through email from one person, Copying those instructions into an Excel Document, and then passing the excel document to a programmer. Oh and then there's all the times they made me Play Test games because the studios were too cheap to hire dedicated Testers. Wow, so basically I got hired as a game designer only to work my way down to testing lol.
Best boy George doing that HOT journalism.
Once again, a great video with excellent research. I only got to work a brief 3 month stint as a tester for a certain Japanese company and everything you mentioned was 100% true.
Classism, low pay, second class citizen treatment, security patdowns to make sure we're not taking devices, monotonous work, no internet access and no way to move up.
Never again would I work a job like that and I wouldn't recommend it. I'm still in the games industry but mainly in marketing.
I was half expected Super Bunnyhop's voice to turn demonic at the end
This kind of QA policy extends to major non-gaming businesses as well. They crunch QA a few days before release in a brutal way. A whole quarter to develop some new features. Some delays. Mock-ups don't arrive. Additional delays. Suddenly you have four days to test something that is still subject to change before a production release.
Leftist George pleases me greatly. Lets awaken those class consciousnesses, comrades!
use comrades instead of boys, it is more fun
Loshar Clan good catch, Cømradę
i would like 1 order of consume the rich pls
White people are gathering again
What a great video. Did your research. Anyone I know going into the game industry will have to watch this.
>you're not allowed to unionize
what?
how did the US go from example of social rights that the world celebrates of may first to the government letting you know you don't get that right?
Well, the US is the country where corporations are people, somehow. And yet have more rights than people.
Es lo que hay No you can’t unionize as a CONTRACTOR.
The reason why contractors can’t unionize is because they’re technically separate business entities that the other company is hiring for a service. So, somewhat ironically, if they were to unionize, they could potentially be breaking antitrust laws. In the eyes of the law, it’d be similar to if car part manufacturers all teamed up to raise the price of parts.
And no, unions are legal, they do not simply ignore the law and exist anyway.
My dad was in an electricians union, that was legal, and I couldn’t find anything outright banning unions. In fact if I remember my High School AP history class well enough, unions are protected by fed. law.
Unions are legal, just not encouraged, and companies will do a lot to discourage such practices, and reward its absence, especially in jobs designed to be expendable.
While contractors can sometimes join unions, there's always been a legal battle going on questioning the validity and justification of such practices, considering contractors are more "outsourced work" than employees intentionally retained long-term.
extreme *extreme* progression of capitalism
The only thing preventing you from unionizing is people who are qualified and willing to do your job regardless of how bad it is.
In other words, the more desperate people are for jobs and income, and the less qualification needed to perform the task, the harder it is to unionize.
Which is why desperate poor people are really beneficial for the rich. As long as they don't get so desperate that they become willing to fight and die in numbers to change things.
It's all about that balance, that perfect amount of desperation.
Worked for THQ QA at one point and they made sure you understood that if you got fired you would be blacklisted. They paid poorly and basically made a point of feeding off of some local colleges that had video game programs. If you didn't make real nice with the office manager and the dept supervisor you would be kept as a permanent contractor so they could fire you in a heartbeat instead of ever having a full shot
As a gamer, years ago I had been asked on occasion to get into game development or game testing. And I wouldn't, knowing that they'll likely be terrible jobs. Or at least I'd likely end up getting in one.
Over all these years, let's just say nothing has made me regret that mindset.
Really amazing video, George! There are humans behind every product, videogames are no exception! Nonetheless it is really rare for someone to comment on it!
I've been telling people this for years. Don't become a school teacher, don't become a cop and lastly don't work for a video game company. (Don't move to California either)
These are some great video's that make me feel even better for having a well paid non-game industry day job, and indie-Gamedev on the side :)
Also i live in the poorest province in Canada and minimum wage is so much higher than California compared to cost of living. plus we got free healthcare so I don't have to worry about many expenses that I would if I just lived a bit south of the border.
Since I watched this video, i started a QA job at a Publisher, and while the info is correct, I've also been treated well and have not experienced anything that apparently occurs at these places. It's a blessing, but i know it's not the norm in the industry.
It's a thing for most industries. You have to know a guy or show outstanding skill to move up. The minute you do its classism. I've seen it. Hope to break the trend should I get the opportunity.
Showing outstanding skill to move up is how it should work.
@@JeremyComans outstanding skill as in better than the rest of the people doing the job already.
That is without a doubt the darkest ad segue I've ever encountered on RUclips.
Well done.
"How the NORTH AMERICAN game industry treats its testers"
Would be actually pretty interesting to know about the rest of the World
Got any testimonies from QA testers outside of America?
I don't understand why you would want such a separation between testers and developers. I can only imagine that both parties could greatly help each other to... help each other.
Stickin it to The Man.
Bless you George.
Worked at pre-collapse Majesco QA in early to mid 00s. Can confirm - was paid absolute peanuts, and worked crazy hours. Was able to work my way up to (almost) Associate Producer level by having good analytical skills, being interested in the development process, learning to use debug tools, and helping out with art, level design and 1st party certification on several projects. Applied for an art position at another company, and got an offer for more than double what I was being paid. Talked to then Majesco management to perhaps stay with the company if they increased my pay to somewhat livable level, and was told to not let the door hit my ass on the way out: )
Bringing up crunch and showing those examples of some of the biggest names doing it, I still can't believe Dan Houser spoke in a tone one could rightly consider "bragging" about the crunch he put Rockstar through. He was openly proud of how poorly managed his project was and how he was hurting people for it.
He was talking about his own working hours and not the rest of the team. Which were "only" working the standard 80 hours game devs work. And a lot of it came from shitty middle management that top people at Rockstar wasnt paying enough attention to or didnt care about.
Theres more to articles than a headline y'know.
@@Tamacat388 So...my original comment still stands. Houser mismanaged the project.
@@BlargleWargle Except for the part where he acted proud of putting his team through crunch, except for the part where his actual fuck up was claiming he doesnt force crunch on employees and people choose it.
So yea, other than the premise of your comment and characterization of his statements...you were spot on.
I remember on a documentary they showed a girl who was a tester for metal gear and Hideo had her walk on every single possible surface of the entire game to make sure every single footstep sounded correct
I loved qa but those bot tasks grind you down automate checklists also move up and become a programmer engineer
Ages ago I worked as an engineer at a small studio of a major publisher, and the bug quota adversarial relationship was absolutely a thing. I really appreciated getting reproducible bugs from the testers; what I didn't appreciate was getting 100 separate open issues of the same bug on every possible scene in the game. But I also didn't know about the bug quotas at the time.
There was also no direct communication between the devs and QA - but we weren't even in the same country, and all access was mediated by the damn issue tracker, which was designed to be as onerous as possible. There was no way to mark duplicates or to bulk-resolve a bunch of bugs based on having the same root cause, everything needed to be closed individually with a specific explanation of what was fixed.
Life as a developer wasn't even that much better than it was for QA, either. Engineers regularly worked 100+-hour weeks, we were making $50K/year *salaried* (no overtime) - essentially the equivalent of $10/hour, when our studio was based in Manhattan, NY. The game's writers were working just as many hours but making half as much. And the spectre of being shitcanned at the end of each game was very real. Burnout and churn were major issues.
I lasted 9 months.
Some misleading things in this video. QA doesn't usually "polish up" anything or fix bugs at all. QA finds and documents them. The developers fix them and send the bug documentation back. QA themselves are RARELY in the actual development tools.
5 years of Video Game QA experience. It’s like doing hard time.
I did some work as a tester for a certain American branch of a Japanese developer/publisher around 2012, not sure if I can disclose who tho so I won't name them; work is brutal and underpaid, although in my case I was more of an intern rather than a full time employee so I wasn't getting paid anyway but still, my co-workers at the time told me some horror stories about going overtime, not receiving enough compensation or outright not getting paid for months.
never be an intern, always get paid, screw that company
Fuck yeah, welcome to Breadtube George, we've been waiting for you
We must seize the means of development, QA comrade!
Haven't we already? We have so many open source gamedev tools, and teams of single people are publishing games everyday.
Worked at one of the QA companies listed, ShastaQA. Not a video game QA company. They do mostly business/commercial webapps. Normal hours, decent enough pay because they only have locations in low cost of living areas. Successfully jumped from there to a proper SD position elsewhere. Would recommend for the right person.
Testers of the world, unite!
I just tweeted this out - excellent video! Never worked as a QA in Game Dev, but seen most of this in other sectors as well.
"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."
- Alphose Carr
IT workplaces here in Maryland are famously harsh on ZeniMax QA testers when it comes to interviews. If the people interviewing you play video games, odds are, they're gonna roast you and view your tenure at a ZeniMax QA position as a stain on your career rather than actual work experience.
That's quite unfair to them, at the end of the day, it isnt their job to fix the bugs they found.
I work as a programmer in the AAA industry and let me tell you - good QA is invaluable and extremely underrated. I don't think my employer has paid more than $1 million for QA over the last 10 years, but we've lost upwards of $8 million due to errors that slipped past the testers. And those are just the losses we can measure objectively, there's plenty more that's difficult to approximate.
Having low pay and extreme overtime has led to many mistakes on the testers' part. I don't understand why AAA companies gamble their money like that.
If you're a tester looking for a job - ask for more money and walk away when companies don't want to bargain with you.