I often get questions from people wondering whether a job in quality assurance is a good path to becoming a game developer. The answer is, “not really.” Here’s why.
First let’s look at why getting a job as a game tester might look like a good way into game development. The logic runs something like this.
It’s hard to get a job making games for a living. There are only so many jobs. Every gamer on the planet wants one. Competition is fierce.
Most of those jobs require professional skills that take years to develop and prove.
Programmers typically need at least a bachelor’s degree from a good university. Even that isn’t really enough—you also need to show skill, experience, and interest beyond just a 4-year degree. This usually means either coming with a awesome portfolio showing the amazing programs you’ve written, the indie games you’ve already made successful, or a Master’s degree in game programming from a solid, professional program like The Guildhall at SMU (where I teach).
I think that programming is the coolest job in game development (not to mention one of the most lucrative), but not a lot of people have the discipline to get the education and experience you need to be a professional game programmer.
Art is another option. But it’s not really any easier. A professional game artist also has mad art skillz demonstrated through a killer portfolio in 2D art, 3D modeling, and/or 3D animation. They often develop these skills through a bachelor’s degree and, again, a Master’s degree like the one we offer at the Guildhall. Not to mention lots of talent and practice.
Level design is the third major option. Once upon a time, level design was the specialization for people who didn’t want to specialize. If you didn’t have any higher-level technical or art skills—if you just loved games and wanted to make them—level design was the path for you. But more and more, level design is also a highly demanding professional specialization requiring years of experience-building and study. (And yes, the Guildhall trains level designers too.)
But what do you do if you’re desperate to make games but you haven’t yet spent the time to develop a professional level of skill in one of these areas—programming, art, or level design? In that case, you’re liable to consider any path into game development. Even a painful or humble one.
Hence the attraction of quality assurance (QA). In a QA job you test games, finding bugs and reporting them. That sounds pretty fun to most people. And although being a tester isn’t the most glamorous role in game development, it is a role. To many aspiring game developers, QA sounds like a foot in the door. They imagine they’ll spend a year or two playing games eight hours a day, chiming in their own ideas whenever the opportunity arises. Eventually they’ll stand out from the crowd, a bright light will shine down upon them from above, and they’ll be lifted up into the glory of a real game development job. That’s the dream of QA.
It’s a dream that virtually never comes true.
If you become a tester for a game company, you will most likely be one of dozens, maybe hundreds of testers. All of those testers will have the same ambition that you have. They all have games that they want to make. They all can talk all kinds of smack about what makes this or that game great or terrible or what-have-you. They all currently lack enough skill in programming, art, or level design to gain a “real” job actively contributing to a game. Although you’ll be working for a game company, you’ll still be one out of a big crowd of competitors all gunning for a tiny number of jobs.
Indeed, in some ways you’ll have harmed your chances. Game developers often see testers as a lower class of being. Good companies fight against this tendency, but the tendency is still there. Testers are often consigned to their own isolated ghetto—either a packed hive of cubicles within the developer’s office building, or even a separate building situated remotely from the actual developers.
Developers tend to have little to no respect for testers. From a developer’s standpoint, there seem to be hoards of them and they come and go without apparent fanfare. The only interaction most developers have with the people who find their bugs is receiving problem reports and complaints from them. Since it’s not much fun to have your work picked apart and criticized, developers often don’t feel a fond association with testers. Sometimes testers can’t resist going beyond mere bug-finding to offer their own brilliant ideas. Except they don’t seem brilliant to a developer—they just seem irrelevant, silly, uninformed, or presumptuous. By joining a QA team, you put yourself at risk of earning game developers’ contempt, not their admiration. In some ways you’re farther from getting a game development job than if you had stayed on the outside and simply built up your skills and portfolio.
Another downside to working a QA job is that the work itself can be terribly frustrating. “Playing games for a living” sounds mighty nice. But imagine being forced to play the same game every day, eight or ten or twelve hours a day, week in, week out for month after month. Maybe that still sounds fun to you. Now imagine that the game is full of bugs. You keep falling through the ground unexpectedly. The camera shakes uncontrollably 50% of the time, giving you a headache and nearly inducing an epileptic fit. Your save games don’t work, so you have to keep starting over from the beginning. One day the enemies are impossible to kill, then the next day they become laughably fragile.
QA isn’t playing games for a living. It’s finding bugs for a living. And finding bugs means living with bugs. For hours and hours every day.
Testers don’t get much respect, but they should. Every game you’ve ever loved only got that way after months of careful bug-finding and -fixing. QA departments are crucial. Without them, bugs don’t get found, bugs don’t get fixed, and customers are left with irritating, bug-ridden games. QA is an important and honorable job. A good game developer appreciates the bug reports he or she receives from QA and the people who carefully find and describe them. But no matter how valuable the job is, QA is a thankless and often tedious task. Nothing will make you sick of playing games (or at least certain types of games) quicker than testing them.
So is QA a good way into a career in game development? Not really. Joining a QA team doesn’t mean joining a game development team—it means joining the reeking ghetto that sits downstream of a game development team. And it doesn’t mean playing games for a living—it means finding bugs for a living, which is most definitely not the same thing.
All that said, it is true that people do sometimes graduate up from QA into a real game development job. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s a relatively quick path into making games. As a tester, you may not be well-respected by the game development team, but you might at least be known to the team. And if the team has a need for an entry-level designer, a basic script programmer, a texture artist, an assistant audio engineer, or an administrative go-fer, and if you happen to have somehow shown some skill in one of those areas, then you might get a chance at moving up.
Just don’t hold your breath. Those “graduation” opportunities come up rarely (once every year or two, perhaps?) and only benefit a small proportion of testers (perhaps one in a hundred?). Chances are, a job in QA won’t lead to a job making games. Chances are it will lead nowhere.
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What’s the career path for a job as a game designer?
I’m not sure what you mean by “game designer”. If you’re imagining a job where a person thinks up ideas for how a game should play, then tells the rest of the team what to make, then the career path to that sort of job is to go out into your backyard at night, look up at the stars, and dream.
DIfferent companies have different jobs that more or less fulfill a role that is something like what people think of as “game designer.” Often the producer or director effectively control the design of the game. On other teams, groups of people—either the specialization leads or else “cabals” of ordinary developers—develop the game design or parts of it. Sometimes a team will have a dedicated “game designer”, but this is a relatively rare post, and usually doesn’t really involve the kind of work you might imagine.
Everybody wants to be a “game designer”, but the job you’re imagining is either rare or non-existent, depending on how you’re imagining it. There is no career path for “game design”. If someone tells you they’ve got an academic program that will prepare you for a job in “game design”, they either mean level design, or they’re lying, or they’re joining you in a fantasy.
How about a career path in game development as a computer science student? With gaming as a hobby. I really wanted to go into game development, but I just got my first job in a SME.
I recently turned down a spot at Guildhall in C17, due to not wanting to go into deeep debt. I managed to luck out and find a position at Gameloft’s new studio in New Orleans working on mobile games.
From applying to jobs before and after having a co-op, I can attest to the fact that studios don’t tend to look at people that don’t have industry experience. When I applied to Vicarious Visions, they didn’t even consider me until after I had a 6 month co-op programming games, and they wouldn’t even consider others in my class. And recently, when I tried to find a fulltime job, it’s was hard to find an entry level position. Even then, it was hard because I tended to be underrated.
From my limited experience, if one wants to be a programmer, they have to be very good at everything and it helps to have something to specialize in. Though again, you can’t be just very good at one thing, to be able to pass an initial programming test, you have to be very good at a wide variety of subjects to have a chance at being hired. So, you can get turned down for a networking position because a studio doesn’t think your 3D math is as good as it could be.
I mean, it’s tough as both someone trying to get into the industry, and for a studio to pick out who they want to hire. So, you may get turned down because they say you aren’t as good at something as they want, even though the studio may not have properly put your skills to the test. It’s tough, but don’t give up, and just keep on applying to places. Look specifically for entry level positions, it’s your best chance of getting in the industry with limited to no experience. Also, be respectful and don’t bad mouth the company because they feel you didn’t test well; get feedback from them as to why they turned you down, and use it to help your chances at another place.
Trying to make it as a programmer requires learning and growing, you can’t stop wanting to learn new things, as it’ll keep you at the top of your game and give you a much better chance of being hired and keeping your job.
I don’t mean to interject, Jeff, as I have limited experience. Just my observations thus far. Love the blog, just stumbled across it today. And it’s cool to think if I could have afforded to go to SMU, I would have been one of your students this year. Pity.
Thanks very much indeed for your contribution. Far from being an interjection, I think your comments are very perceptive and helpful.
I’m sad, too, that you weren’t able to come to the Guildhall. It is definitely the “easiest” (heavily loaded word) way of leaping from the lowest level of job seeking in the games industry to a high and very respectable level. Many Guildhall students take on loans to complete their education, which is naturally scary for them. But our goal (which follow-up with graduates has so far confirmed that we are meeting) is that the cost of a Guildhall education can be paid off in six years by a graduate working under average conditions. In the grand scheme of national education costs and loan payoff rates, I think that’s an excellent prospect.
Still, I understand that in your situation the economics didn’t work out. Thanks for chiming in on what the job market is like if you “go it alone.”
Very informative. What about trying to become a game producer without the art, programming or level design skills? Is there anyway besides the QA route?
Managers within the games industry without professional skills are generally viewed with well-earned skepticism. A person whose only skill is “managing” will struggle to understand—much less take—the crucial decisions needed in a creative-technical project. “Managers” are easily replaced. A great team of strong craftspeople can function without management, or with lightweight management provided from within. So no, I would discourage anyone from trying to become a producer without learning to actually build games in hands-on way.
My experiences have been a little different. I was a producer in the industry for 9 years and got my start in QA. 80% of the producers I’ve known got their start in QA. I’ve known several designers and artists make the jump from QA to dev team. Your odds are better at companies with smaller QA departments. There are a few things you can do to get out. Let your supervisors and dev team contacts know you want to get out. Then, work to separate yourself from the grunt testers who only want to test. Work to become a QA lead as soon as possible. This will get you more face time with the dev team. I spent 6 months in test before getting an assistant producer gig.
Now, I’m teaching game production at a school in Chicago. I tell my students that if you can’t get a job in your chosen discipline, QA is a great backdoor into the industry. I agree with you that QA is treated like the red headed stepchild and that isn’t fair. But getting your foot in the door of QA makes it easier to make contacts and network with professionals.
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[...] Just don’t hold your breath. Those “graduation” opportunities come up rarely (once every year or two, perhaps?) and only benefit a small proportion of testers (perhaps one in a hundred?). Chances are, a job in QA won’t lead to a job making games. Chances are it will lead nowhere.(source:jeffwofford) [...]