Activision QA Workers Vote to Form Largest US Video Game Worker Union to Date
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Cheapest is not equal to less rights. Compared to US most developed countries are cheaper, but with more labor rights. So it would make sense to outsource it to, say, CEE EU countries.
If you outsource to anywhere with a different language (which, from the US PoV kinda includes much of Europe, but less than you might expect from the national languages), what's lost in translation is comparable to the impact of machine natural language processing — so you get the same quality from ChatGPT etc., which is cool, but not quite good enough. (And when LLMs become that good, it will make a lot of people very sad).
If you outsource to poor countries, you also have to worry about the stability of the power grid and telecoms impacting your ability to communicate with the reliability you expect in corporate circles.
There's also a lot of variation in online security by nation, which forms part of the remote working rules in some companies: https://ncsi.ega.ee/ncsi-index/?order=rank&archive=1
The reality is, if it was cheaper, it would have been done yesterday. You are not saying anything.
In this case, as the parent stated, outsourcing would be a likely outcome
No one is more eager or qualified to give feedback about games but the gamers themselves. The downside in this industry is minimal. No one can sue a game dev if a bug slips out, assets can be rolled back or whole systems changed to negate their impact with no recourse available to consumers.
So a large QA team is only needed nowadays for games that nobody is really that hyped about, or games that cannot risk any chance of plot-lines/art leaking before release.
QA is also about: 1. Exploring every corner of the software, comparing it to the written spec, and measuring any discrepancies, even those not visible to the user. 2. Exploring beyond the corners of the spec and using that exploration to improve the documents. 3. Writing software to automate this exploration and to automate defect-finding in general. 4. Fuzzing and other “red team” penetration testing. 5. Participating in design reviews and contributing towards the testability of the product. In other words working side by side with the developer to ensure the hooks are there to make the software testable and automatable. 6. Monitoring metrics and telemetry to find trends that are emerging post-deployment and getting them documented and reported before they are widely noticed.
And so on.
QA should be a highly skilled, highly technical job, a level equal to developers. If QA at your company is just waiting for a new build to get thrown over the wall so they can manually test it in a vacuum, your company might be doing it wrong.
I think part of the problem for SDET is that pay bands are often different (read: lower) for SDET, and if you are doing SDET you already probably have the skills to be a developer and are going to opt for the higher pay band/career path. A lot of companies seem to hold a weird perspective that SDET is "lesser" or requires less skills than just a typical feature developer.
That used to be the norm but it’s not always now. Just look at Minecraft or Terraria, they’ve been getting updates for over a decade now
They are highly skilled and technical.
generally a good game developer wants to know how they've affected balance, which is something an acceptance test won't tell you.
They might be better skilled than the average players, but their actual profession is QA, e.g. making sure the game runs, not that it's perfectly balanced.
As far as balance feedback, you can't do better than actual top players.
QA may provide good balance feedback but are rarely valued for it/do it on their own time with career progression in mind. They often are a rare combination of players who also understand the dev side.
For actual tuning before release, playtesting and other user research involving players representative of the target audience is the gold standard.
Corporate thinking being what it is, I don't hold out hope they will ever learn you can't lean and bean-count a creative industry, it isn't a widget factory.
Upside is when they lean so much their financials get shakey because gamers are staying away you can pick up their entire catalog for 75%+ off, even better if you pick a game with a solid mod community that patches and adds functionality.
That's opinion is wrong though, because testing is more then just playing the game a little.
You get the same issues in companies that straight up don't value tests whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, bugs become increasingly frequent, especially if the software is developed by multiple people.
Methodically testing something in a reproducible manner, potentially through scripting to enable regression testing is challenging, in some cases more challenging then writing the code/behavior you're testing.
glimshe isn't wrong about how hard this is going to be for the QA people though. These companies don't value quality, which is precisely the reason why they're hiring the people that are easiest to replace. Most QA workers currently just go through the motions of a "manual acceptance test", with the result you just mentioned.
Any time a game ships with horrible bugs, i wonder how many more even worse ones had to be fixed, for the game to ship with the remaining ones.
Pretty sad because good QA folks provide a lot of value despite what I'm reading in some of the other comments here.
In the film industry, the fact the job ends is just part of the culture. At least owning up to that, paying OT, and giving folks an opportunity to line up another gig would be good. Even better if the union handles healthcare so there's no disruptions there.
By the time most games reached our offices for testing they’d already undergone most of the core testing in Japan or at their developer’s studios. We were essentially just there to make sure last minute bugs didn’t slip through the cracks. Management rarely prioritized gameplay or even functionality bugs to be fixed, unless it was easy to reproduce and clearly prevented overall progress in the game.
We shipped one big fighting game and wrote up a bunch of bugs that clearly showed that online play was nigh-unusable, and nothing got fixed. The game came out and was ripped apart in reviews for the low quality of its net code. But it had a bunch of single player modes that were rock solid so they let the online modes slide. This was a few years before fighting game developers started seriously considering the importance of online play, and taking major steps to improve its quality.