Good questions... It's hard to answer that first one, because I can only tell you what I know based on the several dozen projects I've worked on. But those projects are barely a proper representation of the entirety of the game industry in the past ten years.

I'd guess that it hasn't changed overall, but that certain…

Oh I'm perfectly stable and happy currently, but thank you anyways. Mobile is really the place to be right now.

Thanks very much on behalf of the testers of the world. ;)

Hahahahaha this has happened to me many times. Probably my most memorable testing induced hallucination was working on a franchise where the player character collects gold rings (lol, I wonder what it could be). Well I would drive home from OT late at night and the little yellow lines in the road would turn into gold…

Really you just need to apply. As someone else commented last week, a lot of people "talk about working in games, but less than a quarter of those people ever actually submit a resume or application."

Unfortunately all I can say about particular studios, is that you should contact people that already work at a studio…

Excellent question! I have had intense debates about this very topic a few times now. My stance on the topic is that "yes, unions would be a good idea... but the nature of QA makes replacing testers so easy, that the studios would never want for new blood, and therefore can hire and fire anyone at their leisure,…

Hi Drago,

I think you are in a pretty good position to make the jump to games. But I have to ask, why would you want to? Most game testers who stay in the the industry almost always make the jump from games to general application/hardware QA. What you want to do is the opposite.

If this is really your goal though, I…

I think your best bet would be to hit up a forum or a place like Reddit, and ask that very question to a tech focused sub-reddit/group.

There's a bit of an extensive conversation about this farther up in the article. But to briefly touch on it here.

First you have to understand that there is not a single product on the market, or that has ever shipped that was 100% bug free. No matter how much testing you do, or how many people you put on a title,…

You seriously don't need any experience or skill sets (other than an analytical mindset, which is a huge help) to get a basic entry level QA role.

You CAN work in entry level QA and EVENTUALLY make your way into any myriad of different positions. The key is communicating with your team. Let them know you'd like to…

Well, my QA team is completely internal at this time.

But speaking from past experience, there is quite a big difference between internal and external QA testing. the biggest difference is communication within an internal team is much more streamlined. I mean any tester can simply get up and walk over to any dev with…

Yes, actually my first few projects were for a Japanese dev/publisher. The only huge difference is that bug reports have to be perfect when dealing with non-English speaking devs! Actually, damn that reminds me. For the last few months of our last major project with that dev (before we were all laid off), my job for…

I worked at Babbages (one of the many companies that Gamestop eventually absorbed), and having that experience was enough to encourage my first employer to give me a shot. After that I used those 6 months to land another QA job, this time for a start-up company. That job I got because one of the testers met me at a…

My suggestion, start hitting up Mobile devs.

I've heard wildly different stories about different teams at Zynga. I think it completely depends which project you are on, and what the current staff is like. I really enjoyed working with my teams, and while there were a few bros around, everyone was pretty cordial.

Well actually at my first gig, they had a "Bug Wall of Shame", and it had printed copies of bugs from other studios that were either horribly written, were for things that were totally not bugs, or were just outright zany.

A few I remember pretty clearly. Someone had bugged that the animals when hit by the race cars…

One more thing, because I just had an interviewee come in last week and totally do this. If you get a question asked, and you don't know the answer, just say "I don't know that (and state very briefly why)". Whatever you do, DO NOT skirt the question, and try to change the subject, we interviewers pick up on that…

Oh man, what stresses aren't there on the job? lol... but in all seriousness, and depending on the studio, QA can be a very thankless job.

As you can tell by some of the more bitter comments made in this article, a lot of QA testers get burned out quickly, and disillusioned with the job. It's hard to "explain", but…

Hi Jason, Sorry. I thought I answered this last week.

So worst game, would have to be a game starring a famous female character, that came out to tie in with the sequel to the movie from the same franchise. I found no less than 20 gameplay crippling, force you to restart the console crash bugs. Maybe 8 or 10 of them…

Still games... very, very casual games... but games. However I do have to do quite a bit with the hardware, considering I'm the teams lone Android "expert" (expert = I owned an Android Phone when I applied, and no one else did LOL)