___ Hello people. You again observe my translations on the screens of your monitors. The language of my writings is bored and dull, and there are many mistakes, so I will be glad if you show me where I made them. I will try to fix it. I hope you will learn at least something interesting from this article. Oh yes, I threw out what I considered boring, so you can always read the original here.
___ agree, most people playing video games dreamed of making it their profession. Of course, it looks like a good step to start building your career in a game development business, however, the truth is less attractive.
___ IGN contacted the organization to ensure the quality of products, which consist of many beta testers from around the world. We received hundreds of letters in which we wrote about high requirements, low wages and terrible attitude towards employees. Among them were both employees of traditional companies, including well -known developers, and employees of firms developing games for mobile devices.
___ All beta testers signed a non-disclosure declaration (NDA) with their employers. They can be dismissed or may sue them for disclosing information. When they wrote to us, we guaranteed them complete anonymity, so in the article below we gave them pseudonyms to protect them.
___ You are probably sure that this work is a real fairy tale in reality. Ruben claims that you are not paid quite for playing games: “Imagine your favorite movie. Now choose the most favorite passage, the length of, say, 30 seconds. Now start reviewing and reviewing this passage. Over and over again. 12 hours a day, every day for two months. After you do it, let’s see if you can say that you watched films around the clock. Ready to argue, you realized that this is not the same thing … You get a certain area of the game, this is your area, you test in it literally everything. And you work with one area for about a month ".
___ This is not all, beta testers cannot choose which of the products they want to work. “You know, it’s really boring, testing games for children from time to time,” says Rich.
___ Frank adds: “I saw people who simply stopped playing games because they experienced a great disappointment in the constantly repeating process of testing the game, which they had already hated. All this tires strongly ".
___ Despite the fact that many professions where your task is in constantly repeating actions, are well paid, it cannot be said that the testers are decently earned. This is due to the fact that the majority work under the contract, therefore, there are no trade unions thanks to which they could get at least some advantages.
___ instead of any benefits, companies pay increased wages, but Danny still receives only $ 10 per hour. Using these data, we can display approximately the following figures: the average wage of the employee is a miserable 20,800 dollars a year. The minimum wage is $ 7.25, but the testers are not a macdak workers, extensive knowledge and experience are required to conduct a high -quality test and judge the game.
___ Okay, we will omit the fact that companies pay very little to their employees. Let’s take an interest better with regard to experience testers? Danny assures: “I work with one guy. He worked for 8 years, consider it ideal: he never quarreled with the leadership, did everything that they would only ask, and when it comes to testing – he is a real professional. After 8 years, he still pays $ 14 per hour. Personally, I believe that we stand damn more than these 10 dollars per hour ". He is sure that developers/publishers should “offer testers some benefits as the rest of the company”.
___ kit (This name https://kwiff-casino.co.uk/ is such -. translator) tells us that his leader was so greedy that he did not even provide him with the promised copy of the game on which Kit worked. He writes that “after I played this game 40 hours a week for 2 months, I would never buy it”.
___ Danny assures that there really few people have respect for tesers: “We deserve to be treated as other employees to us. Many divide my thoughts, ”he says,“ most are silent because of fear of dismissal;Others, perhaps, just stopped doing this due to the terrible conditions that I am talking about ".
___, unlike the standard work of the type “from 9 to 17”, the last months before the release of video games, the product is suitable for the so -called “decisive moment”.
___ If you believe the tester Pete, there were many cases when they had to neglect the salary: “Before the release, they forced us to stay in the studio and after the end of the working hours, but they never paid overtime for those hours that we worked”.
___ for Frank, forced to stay after the end of the working hours was constant: “It came to the point that I was so tired that somewhere at 3-4 in the morning I just lost consciousness. It was several times. And not only this happened to me. We simply gave a rest to this person and brought to his senses when it was necessary ".
___ Ned -sleeping is not the only reason that influenced the work of Frank and his colleagues: “Food was just disgusting. The only thing that was open near is McDonald’s, united with the Chevron station (And the devil knows who this chavron is, but Google assures that these are refueling – approx. translator), therefore we called it "Chevronalds". I felt like shit and I just wanted to quickly end all this ".
___ Ruben claims that it is extremely difficult to maintain any relationship with your family: “As soon as you start working beyond what you should, it begins to seem that the working hours will never end again. My longest period, when I worked in excess of the norm, was a duration of seven months, while the shortest week consisted of 65 working hours, and the longest of 92 ”.
___ Physical and psychological stress are aggravated by low labor security. “During training, they convinced us that it is not so important“ if ”you are fired, it would be much more important“ when ”they will do it,” says Kit. “They consider it good for the employee who found a larger number of bugs, and after that they decide whether to leave it or not”. You yourself understand that this method does not accurately calculate the quality of the tester’s work: “Once I found and recorded how to make it getting stuck in the tail of the helicopter. I asked other testers to comment on all the bugs I found, because I was one of those people who could find bugs where others did not find anything. However, at the end of the project, the guy who was sitting opposite me found a larger number of bugs. In the end, I was fired ".
___ Find a place where you can work for a long time and make an increase is quite difficult. “Everyone is trying to advance to a position that is already busy, and, of course, does not receive it,” says Phil. He is sure that this problem is aggravated by the fact that the testers are hired through a recruitment agency. Most testers, purely technically, are not publishing staff.
___ Ruben explains: “Most people come, spend from 6 months to a year of their lives at this work, and then they are expelled. You know, this is quite sad, to observe when a person with whom they spent so much time is simply taken and fired ”.
___ dismissal can be part of any work, but he notes that the process is quite cold: “Employers solve this issue simply: they send an invitation to the meeting. You will go to this meeting, and someone else will come to the department where all the testers are located, and say, they say, you are all fired, collect your things, we get you out of here … You always hope that you will be one of those who will be left in their place ”.
___ Companies never have a shortage of volunteers for the simple reason that the profession of a video game tester is very embellished. “Everyone who works as a tester is just consumable,” says Frank. Ruben adds: “If the leadership does not like someone, then they simply refuse to resume his contract, so it is possible to avoid any skirmishes. They remove people who begin to ask questions about the workload and duration of the working day, putting them as “order violators” and their contracts simply will not resume ”.
___ Frank complains: “As soon as the product is ready, you lose your job. You have no benefits, there are no opportunities and, of course, there are no promises that you will be hired at full rate. I worked with many talented people. It is extremely sorry that they were never noticed ". While some organizations provide protection to employees, “the testers do not have the likeness of the trade union,” he adds.
___ Testers could form such a union? This is possible in theory, but Ruben does not believe in this: “It is impossible to form a trade union among testers due to how contracts are processed. If you try, then after a while you will see that your contract has not been updated. And the saddest thing is that the industry is quite small and if you were kicked out for this reason, then all companies in the district will learn about it and, of course, will not hide you ”.
___ Even after passing the test, many games in our time can find many bugs. Take, for example, the Skyrim’a version for PlayStation 3. If the workers were so hard, then how could such large technical errors seep into the release?
___ If you believe Phil, then: "Many of the found bugs are simply not corrected". What is even worse, developers often ignore the advice of testers. Frank: “They did not care about our opinions from the high bell tower. They just spend time and resources ” – until the failure projects will be frozen.
___ “Sometimes companies have to choose which bugs should be fixed,” says Trent, “the essence is that not all games are the same. Millions of combinations are possible, and a team of testers, consisting of hundreds of people, is simply unable to find them, so they are seeping into the final product ”. This, given the possibility of the existence of unique bugs, explains the number of terrible glitches that you can observe in some projects. “Sometimes it happens that you find a bug, but if you cannot write in detail how to call it, then this find does not count. Even if it is a breakdown in the game itself. You must be able to make the bug repeated constantly or often enough to report on it. ".
___ Even if the developers listen to the tesers, some problems can still seize. Trent adds: “It happens that the developers swear that they corrected anything, but in the next assembly of the game something else breaks or what they corrected, still does not solve the problem”.
___ Many bugs are not the reason for the inattention of testers. Sol: "The company blames us in all bugs that fall into the final product". Pete adds: “The manufacturers no longer listen to the testers … But if a bug is found at some show, then everyone announces that this is our fault, even if we reported a bug earlier”.
___ Now you, readers, realized that the stories about the paradise life of testers are a lie or error. History has demonstrated that testers are an integral part of games development. Perhaps, thanks to them, a better product comes out, which, of course, is sold much better.
___ Thank you all for reading and patience. I hope you, kids, liked this article. And, by the way, thanks to Riper for patience. Thanks to my beloved apple juice for supporting me.