1:42 PM on 03.20.2007
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Niero
Nevermind robots and guys in third world countries stealing your game testing jobs -- the competition might soon include that snotty little 11 year old down the street. Acclaim's (lead guitarist?) David Perry is raising eyebrows with their distributed approach to game testing; leveraging the power of the internet to use their best customers as lab rats instead of ponying up for yuppie sweatshops (no offense, San Francisco):
"Normally, you pay 20 or 30 people to test a game for six months. You give them office space. You buy computers for them. It’s a huge cost. Instead, we decided to include the community every single chance we get, so all the testing is done by consumers. They test everything 100%.” This comes at a time when auto-testing is becoming more fashionable. Perry says, “With advanced self testing, the games play themselves. With automated testing the bot will try to go in every possible direction and in every room, every day, in every part of your game, trying to get up through the ceilings and everything. You want consumers who don’t know where to go, banging into every object, falling over everything, trying to get up through the walls. Traditional testers hammering away on something? I don’t know. Those days are going to go away.”
Seems like a good deal for Acclaim and the gaming community. They save money, and average joes get to be more involved in the industry by trying defective games before anyone else. Open betas have certainly become trendy, so it should be no surprise to anyone that these efforts are becoming more sophisticated and involved with development teams. With all the horror stories we've read from awful living conditions and hours at some sgios, I'm sure some testers will be happy to know they can pull their 20 hour fart-filled shower-starved gaming shifts from the smells and comforts of their own beds. As long as mom's paying the rent, this is good news.
[Full article on Next-Gen]
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Contest:
"What do you mean we faield because it doesn't say 'Press Start BUTTON' Press Start should be good enough, right?"
"I really wanted to like this game, but I felt the direction the game creator was taking in Act VI was confusing. As a result, please find enclosed my revised dialog between the protagonist and a character I have renamed as Slorgoth (nee Billiam)......." and so on.
Testers were hired because they could respect an NDA, do their job, and had qualifiable experience TESTING a game. Assuming that some kid in Padukah will run through your levels trying to do everything is REALLY stretching it. You'd be lucky if anyone in beta or even alpha testing runs through a good 60% of the game elements, when they're offered a free chance to play a game early. I know my exposure to most games probably runs at 70% and I ain't drawing a paycheck to walk to every corner of every map to find holes in the landscape where my character can't walk.
"er.. thats not going on tape right?"
EPIC (Gears Of War) has said the exact OPPOSITE of what aclaim proposed, they actually DESIGNED the game by beta testing it.(Design by iteration). After playing a beta the designers or beta testers would go, "wouldnt it be cool if we added this?" then added it to see how it worked. Thats completely IMPOSSIBLE using the "user beta test" system, the development would drag forever+ if each (and most probably stupid) feature made up by users were implemented and tested.
Since EPIC won the Game of the year award just about everywhere, and Acclaim is well.. barely alive after bankruptcy, I think theres more than a slight chance developers will listen to EPIC instead.
kthxbye!
Anything outside the stress tests of MMOs, this idea is dead before it can hit the floor. Thanks Mr. Perry, just shut up and make more Earthworm Jim games. GOOD ones.
Most people will probably download a build just to check it out, and then they will see hundreds of bugs and be turned off of the game completely. And for the people that actually stick it out and test through the entire QA process, I guarantee they will not be willing to pay to play that game at release (and it would be very sh*tty if Acclaim didn't provide them with a free copy anyway).
However, it's completely different if they are paying people to test from home. That would be sweet.
And all that about bots doing the testing. What a fucking joke! If you've Ai that good put it in the game.
How do you figure? OK so you have more office space but they are still paying for an office, the developers and management have to be somewhere. Food and Housing? I am not even sure what this means, I haven't heard of companies paying for food, other than some snacks in a break room, and I have never heard of employers paying for housing.
"They only get paid if they meet their requirements"
Requirements in testing is hard to gauge because you can never fully test a product, so if you say something like the tester will only get paid after finding 75 bugs or after coverage of a certain percentage of test cases what incentive is there to go above and beyond if you are working from home?
"you'll get a broad spectrum of hardware testing as well, from lower-end systems to the newest and speediest rigs"
This is what Beta Testing is for, they give you the real world scenario on a multitude of systems, but you use the in house QA team to verify that the software works on a recommended machine and that you cover all test cases written. If it is left completely to Beta testers less than half of the software will likely be tested. Bugs are constantly found in software that most customers don't come across in day to day usage. It sounds like those bugs don't matter but eventually those bugs almost always bite you on the ass. One reviewer can come across that bug and rip the whole product because of it, I have seen it happen.
No acclaim, I wont to beta test and I wont beta test unpaid. Thanks for sharing the info so I wont buy any game from you in the future.
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