Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Video Game Testing - An Amazing Source of Employment By Anjali Goswami

Republished by Asep Setiabudi

Since long Video games have been the most amazing entertaining source for teenagers. But in recent times, these have been the major source of income to different age people. The question comes into mind that how can these people make money just by playing games? This article envelops the answer to the question.
Game industries are making huge money and are growing at a rapid rate, even faster than all other advancing industries. These companies invest millions of dollars into designing and marketing their new products. They just cannot afford to release a poor game full of bugs and glitches. Therefore, they hire people as game testers or analysts who test their games and make them error-free. This helps these companies to maintain their product quality in the market. Thus, testing game is one of the most vital parts of the game development process.
These game tester companies usually look for people having certain minimum educational qualifications and several years of experience in gaming zone. But there are no hard and core rules and anyone having prior knowledge on gaming, can go for this job option. Further, there are several game tester courses available where people can gain the basic knowledge and experience to work on design prospects of video games.
In the early days of computer and video games, the developer was in charge of all the testing. Since most games were so limited in scope and were simple to handle out, debugging was easy and usually required no more than one or two testers. In some cases, the programmers themselves could handle all of the testing. But as games have become more complex, a larger pool of quality assessment (QA) resources is necessary. These being the case, most game designer companies have a large QA staff to bug out the errors in their games. Some employers offer bonuses for the number of bugs a tester finds and thus provide a source for extra income.