Video Game Tester Salary and Career Facts

Testing is a standard process in game development. It depends on whether the application will be successful in the future and delight gamers or not. One of the criteria for evaluating and popularizing a game is its smooth operation. If it is easy to manage the game, everything is clear and accessible, and in the process, there are no failures and errors, the user will stay with it until the end and leave positive feedback about the development.

Testing is the very key to commercial success, both of the product itself and of the company that developed and released it. Judge for yourself, if in the first minutes of the game, the gamer is faced with crashes from the system, difficulties in managing certain tools and options, this will greatly reduce the interest in the game.

It is the tester, if he is a professional in his field, who will be able to bring the product to the ideal, eliminating any shortcomings and bugs from it. And this is the key task of the video game testing company, which employs qualified specialists who love to play, and in the process are able to analyze game products. And most importantly, the tester also gets paid for what he loves to do. And the wages are pretty high. Let’s talk in more detail about the prospects for the profession of a tester and the specifics of his work.

Specialty “Computer games tester” and its features

The specialist has several other names – beta tester and game tester. The key task of the employee is to check the performance of the game for a computer or smartphone, which is planned to be launched on the global or domestic market. He should test the product on different types of devices and find any existing bugs that could impair game control.

Typically, the analysis process consists of the following steps:

1. Find everything that is out of the given development algorithm.
2. Make sure that the server can withstand the load declared for the program.
3. Check if the game is compatible with the operating system and technology;
4. Analyze localization, which means the presence and correctness of the translation of content into other languages ​​of the world.

Based on this, it becomes clear that the main action of a tester is to play a lot. Isn’t it a dream job! But the tester is not just having fun. That’s not so! He needs to go through all the levels of the game and literally “turn them out” in order for all the mistakes to appear. For this, the professional creates non-standard conditions for the game.

Demand for the profession of a tester

The computer games industry is thriving and growing rapidly. In many companies there is a shortage of qualified specialists. This also applies to beta testers. The demand for an employee of this profession has greatly increased in recent years, which is associated with:

• a pandemic and a growing number of gamers around the world;
• the prosperity of mobile gaming – the market grew by 13.5% and raised the revenue of the games industry to 77 billion;
• a significant increase in the audience is observed on such large platforms as Google, YouTube, Gaming.

Also, the demand for testers of computer games and mobile applications is evidenced by the increased number of vacancies for this position, recorded on the website hh.ru: 500 vacancies for June 2021.

Tester’s salary

Every company that develops and releases PC games and applications for smartphones wants to hire unreal engine developer and improve the quality of its products. It is clear that the remuneration of such specialists should be appropriate. It is intense, monotonous work that requires high concentration, attention, knowledge and skills.

In the US, a tester’s salary a year averages $ 40,000.

In Russia, a specialist receives about 45-48 thousand rubles per month. Depending on the employer, these figures can rise and reach 150-200 thousand rubles per month. It all depends on the complexity of the work performed and the qualifications of the employee himself.