Game QA in practice

How does game QA look in practice? We already went through several examples of how QA works in the gaming industry. One important distinction we can make is to split QA into two major game life cycle phases:

Figure 2.2 – Game life cycle phases

In the pre-launch phase, as we have seen in the previous sections, QA works together with the development team on pre-determined, long-term production timelines. Very often, QA will be added to the team only much later in game development, and early testing efforts will be done by the development team. There is the single pressure point of the release date, and that is generally an equally important and stressful day for QA regardless of which platform, business model, or genre they are dealing with. The release or launch date is the first time your game will go live to a wide audience, and it involves significant marketing efforts and costs to attract players to the game. This is particularly...