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[Nickolaidas]

Yeah.

We noticed.

 

[winjer]

We already knew.

And the worst part is devs complaining that gamers are toxic, if we complain that games are broken.

 

[0neAnd0nly]

It's hard to fit in time for QA these days when you have to work a 4 hour shift, 4 days a week and fit in ample time to virtue signal and trash your base daily.

Got to cut corners somewhere, and QA isn't nearly as important as this ^

 

[samoilaaa]

Gaming is past its prime. Been saying this for a while.

 

[Spyxos]

 

[Barakov]

 

[Clear]

I have grown very little sympathetic to layoffs and this just reinforces my position.

Why? You do understand that devs don't get to set release dates, right? That's the publisher's job.

Look, if devs had no set "drop-dead" finish dates, why would the culture have been predominantly one of heavy crunch at the end of project ?

Its hilarious. People wonder why devs who really care tend not to last in the business, and instead standard practice is to continuously chew up and spit out fresh crops of new hires who are yet to figure out what a thankless task it all is...

I guess being an activist and pretending that your work is going to make a "difference" is a good distraction from the realization that you are stuck between money fixated corporate interests and a permanently angry public neither of a whom gives a toss about you !

 

[ReyBrujo]

By the way, developers shouldn't QA software. In fact developers are the worse for testing software because they have an innate bias to walk the happy path. They should have to test their code at the unit level but testing at a system level should be done by a completely different set of people. In the seventies Boris Beizer said that "the tester in you must be suspicious, uncompromising, hostile, and compulsively obsessed with destroying, utterly destroying, the programmer’s software. The tester in you is your Mister Hyde--your Incredible Hulk". Back then software was written by professionals, nowadays most people writing software don't even have a degree and are more interested in what they are going to do once they turn off the computer than in the software itself.

You need people willing to break the software, the developers know that if they break their software they have to debug, find the error, classify it, maybe even request assistance if it crosses certain boundaries, maybe refactor or re-engineer the code in order to fix it and test it again. For some it's too much of a hassle.

 

[SlimySnake]

By the way, developers shouldn't QA software. In fact developers are the worse for testing software because they have an innate bias to walk the happy path. They should have to test their code at the unit level but testing at a system level should be done by a completely different set of people. In the seventies Boris Beizer said that "the tester in you must be suspicious, uncompromising, hostile, and compulsively obsessed with destroying, utterly destroying, the programmer’s software. The tester in you is your Mister Hyde--your Incredible Hulk". Back then software was written by professionals, nowadays most people writing software don't even have a degree and are more interested in what they are going to do once they turn off the computer than in the software itself.

You need people willing to break the software, the developers know that if they break their software they have to debug, find the error, classify it, maybe even request assistance if it crosses certain boundaries, maybe refactor or re-engineer the code in order to fix it and test it again. For some it's too much of a hassle.

lol as a software developer this hurts but it’s a 100% true.

I am surprised the number isn’t 99%. I bet the rest are lying. We don’t get enough time to code these things let alone test them. Even during my testing i am just testing scenarios listed in the specs and making sure when the qa loads my patch it doesn’t break on patch load. Which btw happens all the time with other devs and my qa friends hate it.

I am one of the few who test load patches and that means going over my LOEs which means worse performance metrics but at least my qa engineers don’t hate me. They still find issues because they test things i just don’t think of and that’s their job but if i tell my bosses that they simply say you should’ve thought of it yourself. And they are right but in a perfect world where i had more than a few days to code stuff maybe i would have time to rest and break things instead of just testing the core functionality.

No one wants to pay engineers and even fewer want to hire the qa we so badly need.

 

[Loomy]

Even during my testing i am just testing scenarios listed in the specs and making sure when the qa loads my patch it doesn’t break on patch load. Which btw happens all the time with other devs and my qa friends hate it.

That's the thing. Managers don't realize that a dev, QA, and designer will go through and test completely different things with a few overlaps and - like you said - it will mostly be what's in the acceptance criteria.

I've had friends who used to be QA testers, got laid off and had a hell of a time trying to find a time trying to find a new job because most places just aren't set up to have QA in their process.

All this sound so fucking depressing when you read/write it.

 

[Heimdall_Xtreme]

Ouch

My Eggs

 

[stevish]

I work in QA, not in games but general tech. There's lots of issues facing QA in general that I'm sure expands to games.

There's no real end to QA, it's more based on how much time you have, and what's acceptable to ship. This generally isn't decided by the QA team, and is left to business/product owners/directors.

You can't thoroughly test in most areas until dev is complete. There are estimates on how long testing should take.... But this is dependent on code quality, and timelines for QA usually get squeezed. Test case automation is in a similar position. I'm not even sure how you would automate in games. Would be cool to see what tools they have. APIs are easy enough but games? No idea.

I think QA tools in general could be greatly boosted by AI or in general... there just isn't as much focus on QA tools as Dev.

I think the other problem these games face is they outsource QA to studios and you're going to get varying range of quality because of this. Some get paid per defect which is straight up stupid. A lot of testers won't have a clue what they are supposed to be looking at.

 

[JayK47]

Why finish a game when people will happily buy an unfinished product and then do the testing for them? Most games these days release in such shit shape, people have gotten used to it.

Funny that games like Dragon Age Veilguard are basically bug free and run good, but has shit writing and characters. You can't win it seems. At least with games like Cyberpunk and STALKER 2, it will eventually be a good game since the core story and characters are good and it just needs the bugs worked out. Tehre is no fixing Veilguard.

 

[SlimySnake]

That's the thing. Managers don't realize that a dev, QA, and designer will go through and test completely different things with a few overlaps and - like you said - it will mostly be what's in the acceptance criteria.

I've had friends who used to be QA testers, got laid off and had a hell of a time trying to find a time trying to find a new job because most places just aren't set up to have QA in their process.

All this sound so fucking depressing when you read/write it.

QA are extremely unappreciated in the tech industry. one of the first things i heard starting my job 15 years ago was that QA was a formality. This came from an Engineering VP who started off a software developer himself in the 90s.

I have spent the last 15 years fixing his code and trying to figure out how to not break everything when changing or adding a simple functionality.

I always nominate my QA engineers especially the good ones because they are the last line of defense and crucial in client happiness. ive seen clients refuse updates for a year because every time they would load an update, we would break things in their system.

We have improved recently. Previously QA had only 20% of the time that had been allocated for dev, but during covid we changed it to 30% and now we let QA pick their own LOEs. Sometimes they can be as large as dev LOEs, but with software getting more and more complex as it gets older, i think thats the right way forward. Games need to do the same because they are far more complex than they were even 10 years ago.

 

[Nickolaidas]

Okay, I'm sorry - don't mean to sound like an asshole, but are there people who legitimately expected an AAA 2025 game to run at 60FPS on a freakin' 3060?

 

[FoxMcChief]

I’m sure the same was said in 1999. Just standards have dropped in these days of what even “good” tested game looks like.

 

[Spyxos]

Okay, I'm sorry - don't mean to sound like an asshole, but are there people who legitimately expected an AAA 2025 game to run at 60FPS on a freakin' 3060?

He shows that in the video, but there are definitely AAA games in 2025 that will reach near or 60 fps with the card on much higher settings and 1080p. While MH Wilds looks like ass and runs at 560p internally with dlss. The game is just totally unfinished and unoptimized and even the 3060 should perform better on the lowest settings at 1080p than it currently does.

I can't get a stable 60 fps with the 4070 super on 1080p high settings with dlss...

 

[duck_sauce]

But, but, but, they value DEI more than QA, that is more important

It borders on neurotic that there are always guys on here that bring every topic down to woke and DEI.

Get professional help!

 

[SirTerry-T]

I used to work in QA and every time I read some fucking spaz online saying "how did they not catch this bug???" I want to bash their skull in with a claw hammer.

QA catches a massive amount of bugs. The problem is not QA. You don't need AI to catch them. The problem is the programmers a) not having enough time to fix everything, b) not having enough manpower to fix everything, c) needing to fix something much more important instead, or d) simply not giving enough of a shit ("by design").

If you think you're being smart by pointing out an issue online, trust me, they spotted it and there's probably been a JIRA entry about it for months - but it was probably just a little bit more important that the programmer's time was spent making sure the game fucking boots at all.

Well said. I wouldn't want to swap places with any Q&A staff towards the tail end of a Dev cycle. Not enough respect and understanding given to those guys.

Of course in Forum land every one is an expert but the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of them have not got a fucking clue what they are talking about.

 

[ReyBrujo]

QA are extremely unappreciated in the tech industry. one of the first things i heard starting my job 15 years ago was that QA was a formality.

I started as QA as well, 3 months into I was asked if I wanted to develop and I told them to sign me in. Back when I started in 2002 there were very few guidelines for testing down here, especially in an agile environment as we have been implementing since then (XP).

I like quoting Boris' book because it was an eye opener back when I read, even though it is an old book and some of its statistics are probably off by now they mostly look to be still fairly accurate. For example, he mentions "Typically, although testing will consume more than half of a programmer’s professional life, less than 5% of the programmer’s education will be devoted to testing." This is one of the reasons I focus so much on unit testing and TDD which might work for some and might not work for others but, personally, writing code without having the tests already in code (and the following ones already in my mind) is rather uncomfortable, it's like coding as it was coded back in the seventies or eighties.

 

[Ulysses 31]

 

[DeltaPolarBear]

Just as devs stop trying to shrink file sizes because they don't care any more, devs also stop thinking bugs are critical mistakes.

The documentary on SF2 arcade had the devs being really angry at themselves that bugs were found with their launch arcade machines. Because that has consequences and they can't fix them easily. That mentally doesn't exist anymore in modern devs.

 

[Buggy Loop]

Any person working on software development can tell that for current games it is impossible to test everything, also the amount of edge cases and combinations of things that you can do to break the game could be infinite, I'm actually surprised that most games release on a playable state.

I'm glad I don't work for the games industry, working on Fintech apps is less punishing.

Then there’s Nintendo with Zelda ToTK which just boggles the mind how they even tested it all.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

Just as devs stop trying to shrink file sizes because they don't care any more, devs also stop thinking bugs are critical mistakes.

The documentary on SF2 arcade had the devs being really angry at themselves that bugs were found with their launch arcade machines. Because that has consequences and they can't fix them easily. That mentally doesn't exist anymore in modern devs.

THIS. Thank you.

I don't care about their reasons or excuses. They are treating customers like cattle and they don't even care about the quality of their own production. In return, I don't care if they are laid off because of that. Fuck them.

Meanwhile, we have technically flawless games like Death Stranding, Stellar Blade, all Nintendo first party line-up and a long etecera, because those devs cared about their work and their players. In the gachas that so many people like to trash, bugs are a rare sight and they are constantly asking people for feedback. That's respecting your audience.