I'm sure you can find 19 people who want to be paid for playing video games. There are many places where QA isn't paid. It's an honor to help out the development of games and see things early.
It is a little upsetting, but I can see OP's perspective given that some people actually pay for early alpha access ( I am still annoyed at myself for purchasing BG3 demo that will come.. who knows when ).
This weird disregard for someone else's time is oddly widespread.
It is not an honor. It is a job. If you want it to be done well, one should be compensated for it.
It's asinine to think they are just playing the games - QA has complex skills necessary to succeed, from technical writing to careful test planning to cross organizational planning. QA is some of the least rewarding and most difficult work in a games studio.
It's like asking why camera operators in film sets "get paid to watch movies". We've decided we like games, so we better pay people for the labor in making them.
Fuck off with this "it's an honor" bullshit. It's work. It deserves good working conditions.
There are bad parts of every job. The fun part of SWE is coding, but that doesn't mean I don't have to write design docs, coordinat between different teams, etc.
>It deserves good working conditions.
I agree, but that doesn't mean you should make a union to do that.
these people have stopped licking the boots of capitalism and started to demand change. there’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s no inherent moral value that people should adhere to in their work relationship that precludes them from forming a union.
Personally I cannot wait for these “engineers” to be treated like normal technicians.
The odd sense of superiority that people like OP seem to have is nauseating.
If someone else is capable of doing my job for half the pay, then hats off to them, and they deserve it.
So no, it's not hyperbole to suggest the poster is undervaluing their peers.
> that doesn't mean you should make a union to do that.
Usually folks don't unionize until their work consistently fails to deliver good working conditions, so, yeah, in this case you do need to unionize to get that.
It's difficult to become a software engineer, but the job is relatively easy. It's not hard to become QA, or a fruit picker, or meat packer, but those jobs are fucking hard.
An equally soul draining job that requires you to service customers. And equally draining job that puts in physical danger. And equally draining job that takes out on long distance travel, like crewing a vessel.
I really doubt that a company is going to struggle to find people to load up a build of the game and try to clip through walls all day.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
QA is a valuable skill set that is regularly underpaid and overworked. A good QA team makes or breaks a project, and there are plenty of examples of this in modern gaming.
Fuck “honor”, whatever the hell that means, and pay people what they are worth.
The game industry needs to be reorganized around the people who make the games instead of finance them.
>The game industry needs to be reorganized around the people who make the games instead of finance them.
I don't see how this would work. Somebody has to pay all the salaries, legal expenses, expensive equipment and software etc. Expecting people that want to work on video games to pull that kind of money out of pocket to fund a project that may or may not make any money is unreasonable. Nobody that wants to invest their money is going to give it to people who won't give them a return.
Most of the horror stories you are hearing from the gaming industry are coming from large multinational studios, many of which are struggling financially.
Just look at the most recent battlefield release or cyberpunk for examples of what happens when you don’t value QA.