Game Tester: Playing Video Games for Living?

In 2020 global gaming was estimated to be at USD 162.32 billion and will be USD 295.63 billion by 2026, therefore, making it the biggest moneymaker than the global movie industry. Even the most subscribed channel on YouTube is “PewDiePie” who plays videogames on his channel, with the industry becoming this behemoth today there are many career choices for game designers, game artists, and programmers. Although, these job titles need a high skill level & degree to get in. There is one job title that needs no education background or that high skill set. In this article, I am going to talk about Game Tester.

Do You Play Video Games For Living?

This one is the biggest misconception among general people is that Game Testers get paid only to play games all day. Well technically they do play games but they need to have good communication skills with the team and knows how to write a bug report to the devs (developers). The tester’s job will be to make sure that the 10% of the game works 100%. For example, they will be given a small portion of the map in the open-world game or a level in other games their task is to break that small part of the game that they have been given by finding bugs or glitches. Imagine you have been given to watch a movie, but instead of watching the whole movie, you have been given the task of just watching the small portion of the scene again and again for months.

Is Game Tester A Good Career Choice?

Although, you can get in easily in no way the job as easy as it looks. Sometimes you don’t even get to play the game, you just have to log in and log out of the lobby for the whole day to check if it’s working ok. Most of the time you will get contract jobs with hourly pay at 10$ and could increase to 14$, you have to be very good or build a great relationship with a studio. The career progression is almost non-existent with you being a Test or Beta test manager the most.

In every company, there is a phase called “crunch time”. It’s a week time before the release of the game and you have to work long hours like sometimes doing 90 hours of work in a week.

You will get to play games before anyone, you will get to take games copy to home, sometimes you will get to in-game cosmetics or T-shirts and that’s about it.

Conclusion

It’s a glass-half-full experience if you are someone who just loves gaming and doesn’t care about the monotonous of playing the same section of the game again and again. If you have good eyes at finding bugs and glitches, then this is the job for you.