Every other lover of various computer games has probably thought about making his/her hobby a regular income.

For example, you can try to work as a game QA tester since this job becomes really popular in the IT field.

What is a game QA engineer?

We talk here only about specialists whose work is to search for bugs in games before they appear in releases and end-users start to interact with them (games).

Software testing entails a typical and quite an important stage of web software development, that has a big effect on its commercial success.

If a game contains numerous bugs, users will not be really interested in it.

Here we should understand the difference between game testing and gaming.

Game testing services are aimed at finding as many bugs as possible inside software code and have a negative effect on game mechanics.

A gamer’s task is to interact only with a ready web product.

There is a misconception that people simply play the games when they perform game testing — it’s actually not so easy.

[highlight dark=”no”]And you can’t do here without a big gaming experience here.[/highlight]

Moreover, gaming helps a QA engineer analyze game processes properly and thoroughly.

Game tester’s responsibilities

You need to have a good knowledge of English — just like in all fields of the IT industry.

It will be useful either while communicating with a project group or studying relevant literature and using working software.

If you know English, it will be easier for you to test English versions of games and also find and analyze various sources on work topics.

And, for sure, you need to have experience in the game industry since this will help you to move on the career ladder.

[highlight dark=”no”]Furthermore, it will be helpful to have experience interacting with various devices.[/highlight]

It’s a well-known fact that PC games and console games can differ in terms of their technical implementation, have different game interactions, etc.

Soft skills required for a game tester

To sum up, a common applicant for this position should have the following personal and professional skills:

• Be attentive and patient. It’s a typical and generally accepted requirement for any QA engineer. The bugs that appear in game web products are quite insidious, so a tester needs to focus completely on the same task for a long time. Sometimes he/she needs to reproduce the same bug several times and simulate the user’s actions;
• Be able to look at software from several perspectives. It’s crucial to test all possible ways of interaction with a game that is being tested. You should keep in mind that game software developers can’t predict all possible user actions. A game tester should act as an experienced and meticulous gamer, whose task is to find everything that hides inside a game;
• Good sociability. It’s one more typical requirement that testers should meet. This happens because QA engineers need to ask managers, developers, designers, and other members of a QA department about something while performing testing. It’s very important to be able not only to communicate with various specialists but efficiently implement any technical and methodological requests.