Game Testing - What is it and why is it important?

The role of game testing or Quality Assurance Testing (QA) is to find, mitigate, and eliminate potential issues. By adopting testing, gaming companies can deliver bug-free games that create the perfect playing experience. Moreover, testing is a crucial part of the development process as it directly impacts revenue. In fact, the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology reports that the US economy loses around $60B every year due to software bugs.

Generally speaking, all game testing follows a basic structure irrespective of the size of the game and the time required for developing it. The three stages of testing include pre-production, production, and post-production. Preferably, testers should be involved as soon as possible because detecting bugs earlier means that developers will need less time and resources to eliminate them. At the same time, the consequences are less severe when testing early, as gaming firms can tackle problems before releasing a title to millions of users.

What are these primary issues, and how can they be addressed?

With every iteration of the game, testers need to review the test documents, update specifications, and ensure that developers don’t introduce new issues when making changes to the code. A game commonly fails because of technical problems, broken features, critical bugs, bad music sound, and poor video. Luckily, testers can address these issues through different types of testing, which are categorized as follows:

Functional testing

Functional testing refers to finding problems related to glitches, loading time errors, timeouts, wrong messages, or anything that does not comply with software specifications. To attack these problems, testing teams try out the game’s functionalities and report any software errors to the development team. The main tasks involve checking features and how well they integrate with the rest of the game to ensure everything runs smoothly.

Localization testing

Engineers review the game’s text and audio when testing localization to verify that the game adapts to all regions. For example, global games that users play worldwide need to adjust linguistic expressions, local time/date, currency, address formats, and other local requirements. Often, testers must translate and modify dialogs to account for proper language usage and colloquialisms.

Compatibility testing

This testing procedure shows if the game is optimized for various screen sizes and if the final product meets the software, hardware, and graphics requirements. For example, if a game works equally well on a PC as it does on a PlayStation.

Performance testing

Through performance testing, quality assurance experts check the overall performance by examining various parameters. These include server and client response times, battery and memory usage and how many users can access and play the game simultaneously.

After understanding the different types of testing, you may be wondering…

How is testing relevant to video games?

Game testing is crucial for these three main reasons:

#1 Finding bugs

Specialized game testers can notice bugs and errors that developers would easily miss. Thus, incorporating testers into the development cycle ensures a smoother launch with higher game ratings driving player retention and loyalty.

#2 Testing issues in different regions

Regionally based QA testers ensure local game success. Finding testers that speak the correct language and grasp all cultural nuances is essential to guarantee that players in every region have a fantastic gaming experience.

#3 Ensuring consistency throughout the entire game cycle

Finding bugs earlier is essential to avoid incurring higher costs later down the road, but prioritizing quality should be done at all stages. Having game testers do their magic from start to finish can speed up deployment and ensure consistency throughout the game development cycle.

Conclusion

In summary, game testers perform various checkups to identify and discover defects in video games. The main goal is to improve usability and performance while asserting that players have a bug-free and enjoyable player experience.