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Originally Posted by CM Hooe |
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QA in AAA gaming is more than you could handle. It is one of the most trying, strenuous, thankless, and important roles in building a video game.
People who work Quality Assurance jobs in AAA - including at Tiburon, a AAA studio - work tirelessly to report, prioritize, and track bugs internally. They also ensure built features the dev team builds for the new game are working as intended and attempt replicate issues reported by users playing the retail product. QA personnel in AAA typically work 50 hours a week at minimum, and that's not accounting for crunch (short weeks-long bursts before a major deadline or development milestone where 80 hour work-weeks and 16-hour work days are not uncommon).
QA is one of the most thankless jobs in gaming because if the QA team is doing its job 100% perfectly, the end user will never know. Thanks to QA, the worst bugs that ever exist in a video game are never seen by the public; not in retail, not on an E3 floor build, not in a hype video, nowhere and never.
QA is basically invisible to the consumer, but absolutely vital to the process of completing a video game. If you are insinuating that the QA staff at Tiburon doesn't work hard or doesn't work effectively, you fundamentally do not understand the nature of AAA game development.
Sources: my own first-hand knowledge from on my own experience performing QA during crunch as an independent game developer, supplemented by second-hand knowledge from my current supervisor, whose first video game industry jobs were QA positions at Blizzard and Sony San Diego.
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I am a senior engineer and if any of my end products fell as short of customer expectations as does Madden - I'd be looking for a new eng gig.
On the other hand, if my firm and myself were the only ones allowed to create products for my customers I guess the story might be different.
FYI - I have NEVER released anything with as many faults as madden has let alone make no improvements in 1,200+ days with billions of dollars of revenue.
Maybe if OS (the #1 and seemingly only sim forum) held EA to a higher standard and demanded a decent sim game we might get somewhere - instead, all negative comments/reactions are deleted and members banned. I wish in my junior engineering days I would have a group of moderators protecting my work too.