Video Game Tester Jobs - You Qualify By Becoming A Great Game Tester

At first glance you might think that all video game testers need to be paid by a gaming company to be considered professional. But that's not really true. If the bulk of your earnings comes from testing games then you are making a profession of it. You might be testing games yourself, writing your reviews for the benefit of others and earning revenue of Adsense ads, for example. If you really know what you are talking about, you might support yourself this way.

Or you might take on freelance jobs, testing games that are due for release in the coming 12 months. In this case you would be paid directly by the gaming companies. The freelance job is the one most gamers will likely be interested in pursuing, since the job offers significant variety. You can find out a lot more about what you need to do to get one of these freelance video game tester jobs at the Become A Video Game Tester website.

Finally, there is the on-site video game tester who works for a gaming company and has direct contact with other members of the design and programming teams. This is the most difficult job to gain. It pays the most money, but it also has its drawbacks, as testers are required to investigate in much greater detail than a freelancer would be expected to do.

The simple answer to this question is that a game tester plays video games all day and looks for anomalies in their expectation of what should be happening on the screen.

If you attempt to turn a vehicle to the right, and it goes left, well you found a serious bug that needs attention. But there are more subtle bugs too. Most of the time you have no intention of running your characters into walls. But if it happens you expect them to bounce off. If they go straight through... Well, that wasn't the expected behavior, was it?

If a problem is found, a professional tester will go back and try to re-invoke the problem again and again until they think they know under exactly what conditions it crops up. This information needs to be documented so that the programmers can narrow down the section in the code that is responsible for the behavior. Nothing makes a programmer crankier than receiving a bug report for a bug they cannot reproduce! If you want a second job as a tester for the same company, your reports need to be spot on!

The corollary to this is that you need to have expert game levels in order to retrace your steps and set up the same conditions in a game that reproduce the problematic behavior you came across.

Do not expect to be able to jump in and collect top dollar for your first game testing assignment. You will have to prove your mettle. Initial rates for a video game tester job might be $10 to $30 per hour. As you advance up the ladder you can expect to reach the same rates as expert programmers in the industry--which is to say, up to $80 an hour or so. You don't get this money for doing nothing. You earn it by being great at testing. But, of course, the job can be lots of fun too. And that's the appeal of this profession!

Fortunately for you, Matt of BecomeAGameTester.com has set up a special Job Search area that is dedicated to Video Game Tester Jobs. This is available to everyone who has obtained a copy of the Become A Game Tester Ecourse.

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