"The video games industry is bigger than both films and music combined." - someone, years ago

Games are expensive, hard to make, capable of draining every drop of tears, blood and sweat of their makers, and it's a miracle when a title is actually launched.

Games are also very profitable, for a few people.

I's common to praise a single genius, a game designer, a programmer, a director. It's uncommon to remember audio folks, unless there's a very cool ost that you are fond of. Artists get their share of love, producers get all complaints and ask everyone to update their Jiras.

And there are us, QA. The inconvenient people pointing fingers, telling what's wrong and broken. The ones who are blamed most of the time during a bad launch. The unsung heroes for a few, the underpaid for almost everyone.

When I started working, back in 2011, automation was not a thing. There were some companies messing around with that, but my working experience in software development was always through manual testing. Nowadays, automation is a must, you want to test faster, cover all code and requisites, so you have several flavors of tools, frameworks or whatever new thing to create scripts. Probably AI is the next thing in the toolset, I don't know.

The gaming industry is way behind. Even if there are test frameworks for Unity or Unreal, it's not uncommon to work on a messy project, with no good programming patterns, totally "toco y me voy" style, difficult to refactor and maintain. Imagine testing an always changing monster like this.

QA is perceived as an entry role and unskilled job. Who would want to be a QA forever? Do you want to be a game designer? An artist? Get a QA Tester role as your first step in this industry ladder. Or, if you stay as QA, maybe try a production role, or a leadership one. QA testers are temporary, replaceable, not a career path.

I like being a QA. Despite everything.

I like being a game QA even more. Games are chaotic software made by people from very different backgrounds. Most former colleagues that became friends are from the gaming industry, and we have been through hell together.

We make sure that game designers vision was correctly brought to life by programmers. We explore the unknown and try to put ourselves in different shoes, wearing different hats. We are technical, yet experimental. And there's no better feeling than getting all the evidence available to show to that "it works on my machine" person.

Sometimes I think that I do not create anything. My portfolio is not that interesting. I do not have cool code, illustration or music to show. Any bug I have ever written is under NDA and it's not very fun to show a detailed report (but it's funny to tell some bug related stories in a casual way, like when a dev asked me to test the final build and the game crashed in front of him when i just pressed the play button. It was not very funny for them, though). It's not glamorous being a QA. There's crunch, underpayment, depending on the team/company, you are a low level worker. But unless a huge amount of money magically appears in front of me and I do not have to work anymore, I do not see me doing anything else.

The perks of being a game QA? I honestly do not know. I would not recommend anyone pursuing that career. Then I remember all the good people I've worked with and I hope to continue working with such amazing talent.

Please, update your Jiras and respect your QA team.