The gaming industry brings positive impacts to a lot of people. It provides consumers with top-notch entertainment, investors and publishers with profitability, and developers with passion and dedication to their games. However, these facts become a reality only if their games turn out to be the best they can be, as intended.
In recent years, many games have been rejected by users due to a lack of quality upon release. Because of that, even large game studios are putting a significant effort into quality assurance for games to prevent repeating the same mistake.
Today, we would like to introduce the last step of quality assurance, game testing, also referred to as QA. We will find out why professional game testing is required to increase quality and what tests are conducted for quicker, more accurate, and more efficient testing.
What Is Game Testing?
Game Testing, also known as QA (Quality Assurance), is a process of checking the quality of games in development. This process includes a series of tests that cover all aspects of the application, from the general design and structure of the game to performance and user experience. When game testing is conducted, game companies fix bugs or apply improvements by collecting data and feedback and a variety of tests and inspections are repeated until the game is ready for its official release.
Why Do We Do Game Testing?
- Discovering Unexpected Errors: No matter how thorough the game development and review are and how well a developer has designed optimal solutions for the players, there will always be unexpected errors. These errors and other usability issues must be identified in order to increase the game’s quality.
- Improving User Satisfaction: Game testing always prioritizes game user experience. Feedback is collected directly from testers and users and incorporated it into the game directly to improve the quality of the game and ultimately increase user satisfaction. Consequently, game companies can focus on users through prototypes and tests, and satisfied customers will be more loyal to their games.
- Saving Time and Expenses: If games are not sufficiently tested for the sake of quicker development, game companies might have to spend more time and expenses on fixing errors after their releases. This can become a reason for users to leave and will affect overall profits.
Types of Game Testing
Game testing involves more than just playing a game from beginning to end to ensure it runs smoothly. The most common tests are as follows:
- Functional Testing: This test is focused on identifying issues and bugs related to a game’s mechanics, controls, and functionality. It is checked whether the game works as intended and that there are no critical errors.
- Compatibility Testing: With this test the compatibility of a game across different hardware and software configurations, including operating systems, graphics cards, controllers, and gaming devices, is verified.
- Localization QA Testing (LQA): With this test, a game goes through verification in a variety of languages and cultures to make sure that the game is correctly translated and that cultural nuances are adequately considered.
- Performance Testing: With this test, the performance of a game, including the game’s frame rate, loading time, and other performance metrics are verified, to make sure that the game runs smoothly and is optimized for various platforms and devices.
- User Experience (UX) Testing: Feedback on the game’s mechanics, interface, and level design is given through this test, focusing on the overall user experience while playing.
- Beta Testing: This is done by regular users before launching a game. Developers receive feedback on the games’ features, mechanics, and overall quality from the participants who have played it.
Game Testers’ Roles
Generally, game testers are assumed to play games all day in the office. For this reason, a game tester job seems like a dream job for those who love games. However, testers don’t just play games. They follow the developers’ specific requests to test games and find in-game bugs, text errors, UI issues, graphic or audio glitches, and even copyright issues in games. Then they write detailed reports on the issues that they found. Once the developers fix these issues, testers double-check to ensure they are fixed properly. Because of this, testers must not only be able to do more than just find issues but also have to document the issues they have found accurately according to the quality management system.
Ultimate Purpose of Game Testing: Sophisticated User Experience
Every gamer expects the best gameplay along with a games’ fascinating storyline, characters, matching stunning graphics, and thoughtfully balanced levelling system for players. Developers also strive to create the best games possible to meet those expectations, and game development companies and publishers think about their games’ reputation and revenue generation.
Game is an art form where it is key to “implement as it’s designed.” Game testing is an important stage to ensure implementation is beautifully done with meaningful results for everyone.
Latis Global offers several game testing services for both pre-launch and post-launch, as well as always developing and improve new services. For more information regarding game testing, please contact us at any time. (contact@latisglobal.com)
