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The End of Game Testers?

March 20, 2007

This Interview with David Perry on Next-Gen hits on a lot of topics I've been blogging about lately. David Perry, founder of Shiny and developer of classics like Earthworm Jim or MDK, recently tore off on his own to begin consulting for the industry. This landed him in the lap of Acclaim, where he's helping to develop new strategies for bringing Korean MMOs to the American market. You'll remember I spoke with Perry last month about his upcoming Top Secret game, where he's inviting the gaming community to actually come aboard and help with the game development. The best contributor will be named creative director for Acclaim's next MMO project -- See the interview for details!

In the recent Next-Gen interview, Perry talks about giving the community even more of a role in game development. He suggests that the era of the in-house game tester (remember the movie Grandma's Boy?) might be coming to an end. "The concept of traditional testing is going to become more and more consumer based," Perry argues. He goes on to point out that 3000 consumers hammering away at a game and submitting feedback is way more efficient and more effective than hiring an in-house team of 30 people. Not to mention way cheaper.

Perry is right that community testing can be very powerful. Here at FilePlanet we facilitate beta tests for developers all the time -- Check out the Phylon beta! -- and there's no better way to get focused feedback to make a game better.

But I disagree with Perry that this will make in-house testing obsolete. In order to get really good community feedback, the game has to be playable. Assuming you're not paying them for their time, gamers will give great feedback once a game reaches the point of being fairly enjoyable, but is looking for that final level of play-balancing and polish. Throwing an unplayable game out to public testing is a recipe for frustrating a lot of players and generating a lot of bad buzz before your game is even done. That's where in-house testing comes in: It's an ugly job, it's a hard job, and game testers never get the credit they deserve. But They're an important part of the game development process that gets a game off the ground.

Quality Games Done Right

I think a great example is the Age of Empires III development team at Ensemble Studios (Try the Age III Demo). Ensemble's offices have a built-in LAN center, complete with video monitors in a lounge outside that show the game in progress from multiple viewpoints. Not just the QA team but every developer at Ensemble participates or observes mandatory game sessions of the game in progress, continually tweaking and refining the product. Afterwards, Ensemble brought in RTS fans from around the community to participate in the final feedback loop. The result is one helluva finished product, built from extensive internal and community testing. Not every developer has those kind of resources, but that's the way to go.

Speaking of Age of Empires III, Download the Strategic Objectives map and check out the contest associated with it. Talk about community contribution -- the author, Moshe Levi, incorporated a new game type into the map including fixed gun emplacements and forts that can be captured and re-captured. It ends up playing out a lot like Company of Heroes. Great stuff! -Fargo

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