So Steam is now launching a Playtest feature that devs can use.
Why are we letting them do this? This essentially kills everyone else who have actual jobs as playtesters. Why bother hiring and paying somebody to playtest your game when you have the millions of chumps at Steam to do it for you? And you don't even need to announce it as early access or release a demo anymore with this feature. Even if people still hire personal in-house playtesters, this might off 85% of existing ones that aren't already extensively hired in AAA studios.
Valve is once again twisting the knife more and more. Epic creates jobs; Valve destroys jobs.
>Why are we letting them do this? This essentially kills everyone else who have actual jobs as playtesters Good.
Tyler Thompson
Is playtesting an actual profession? Or is it like being hired as an extra where you get $100 a day to show up and fuck around? If the latter, I have no sympathy for anybody relying on that to make a living. Man up and unionize like a big boy profession or fuck off.
Noah Fisher
>This essentially kills everyone else who have actual jobs as playtesters. wtf I love steam now
Connor Diaz
name a game you've played in the last 5 years that didn't get any patches maybe the playtesters aren't good enough at their jobs
your thread is over, goodbye
Ryan Davis
>This essentially kills everyone else who have actual jobs as playtesters. Explain why this is a bad thing. Playtesters are infamously retarded and allow the retard demographic to be overrepresented in tests. I fail to see how a greater sample size could possibly create a worse product.
Bentley Price
QA is an actual profession and this won't get rid of it. The people who need QA are the ones making enough money to afford QA teams and the job requires enough paperwork and development insight that it can't be done by randoms Granted most QA are incompetent mouthbreathers who think it's a stepping stone to a development or design job
David Long
>This essentially kills everyone else who have actual jobs as playtesters HOLY FUCKING BASED
Not only is it a job, but it's a highly sought after job by autists who have no idea what being a tester is actually like. A tester is equally likely to play some garbage shovelware game for hundreds of hours on end, performing the same repetitive tasks in every way imaginable as they are to play a AAA game. Remember that show that Sony hosted that everyone on Zig Forums watched because Egoraptor was in it? The Tester? They were all competing to be a video game playtester.
Brayden Lewis
Playtesters are retards who flanderize games, I hope they all go unemployed.
Adam Carter
Gotcha, thanks. And yeah, everything I've heard about playtesters is they're absolute mouthbreathers so nothing of value will be lost, thanks blessed Gaben.
t. playtester who isn't smart enough to code Get fucked, OP, better touch up that resume, eh?
Isaiah Sullivan
Playtesters are actual scum. They aren't true QA workers
Grayson Moore
On the other hand indie devs can now let their audience playtest their games so they need to dedicate less time and resources for Q&A which will speed up development. Q&A is a job for braindead monkeys, nobody should have to make a living doing this.
William Foster
While I know you're being sarcastic This seems actually pretty good for indies.
Isaiah Moore
This is some incredibly effective and delicious bait. Good on ya OP.
Zachary Evans
gaben knows playtesters are retards, this is a good thing
QA is an actual profession, and in video games it is especially soul sucking. You are handed alpha version .1111.2.11.8.3b and are told to try and complete the game. Should you find a glitch, you must thoroughly document it and attempt to reproduce it as often as possible. Then you are given alpha version .1111.2.11.8.4b and told to do it all over again, except now you've got three new glitches. Repeat ad nauseam. Oh, and its minimum wage.
Nathan Collins
Playtesters are a blight on the industry, this is a good thing
Yeah EA and Ubisoft got rid of those departments and just let the consumers pay to do it.
Cooper Lee
You're acting like companies don't already do this.
Oliver Foster
That job would probably make me hate playing any video game
Lucas Bell
They already did that when they started allowing "early access" games on Steam. This is slightly better in that players don't need to pay to beta test.
Parker Clark
I have a friend who does QA and they're expected to report new issues every single day. It's like working in a call center but somehow worse.
Ayden Wright
>Greg Coomer And people still deny that meme magic is real While we're on the subject, someone post that lawyer whose last name is Cunny.
Okay but why should people get paid to playtest when other people will do it for free?
Adam Torres
And me and my friend were always wondering why we discovered a lot of bugs in nearly every games kek
Joseph Campbell
>This essentially kills everyone else who have actual jobs as playtesters Wait, professional playtesters, who are already mouthbreathers in the first place, will be replaced by the general public, who are even stupider?
Jacob Sullivan
>Oh, and its minimum wage. I can just imagine the people doing it claiming "yeah, I play video games for a living ;-)" to anybody who will listen. Pathetic.
Testers/QA as employees are still preferred over random dudes on the Internet for lots of reasons >NDAs actually enforceable >able to spend a long time reproducing specific steps >able to test on a schedule and even ready 24/7 inside some publishers >access to devkits for consoles >able to compile decent actionable bug reports etc >t. AAA employee
Jackson Thompson
Because people were using Early Access for it anyways
James Wilson
Retard. People who are hired to playtest games need to fill out a ton of paperwork and play the game endlessly, looking through every nook and cranny for possible bugs.
These people are just early access puppets who will report bugs if they encounter them. They're not obliged to be professional.
How the fuck is Valve always ahead of the curve, Zig Forums?
Andrew Moore
Big games NEED playtesters that aren't the fucking devs to find bugs/balance issues before release.
Warframe has been plagued with shitty buggy releases for years because they only do internal testing. Only recently have they started opening up a small test server before some of the bigger gameplay patches.
Smaller games benefit from playtesters with different specs to find hardware incompatibilities before launch. Imagine releasing your game with no playtesting only to find out it doesn't work on xyz driver version and getting review bombed.
no one is going to use this. games like humankind already showed it's easy to set up this kind of thing and yet basically no one does it
Carter Bennett
>Epic creates jobs; Valve destroys jobs. Damn, you really like Epic.
Nathaniel Gray
what the fuck even is this post shut the fuck up
t. playtester/bugtester for various projects who the fuck gets paid for this shit
Andrew Moore
Jesus christ, trump loses and the jews and corps go into fucking overdrive
Leo Martin
I used to playtest. It was awful. 90% mobile games I'd have to try and break which had names I couldn't even remember. When I finally got my hands on a real game do you wanna know what it was? FIFA. Fucking FIFA. I can't even remember that part of my life it's such a slog.
Adam Allen
Pretty based. I had a side thot who was a pole dancer. She lost that job (the business got busted for soliciting prostitution, we arent Vegas) and guess what her next job was? A fucking video game tester.
Jonathan King
If your job can be done by a fucking rando on Steam, maybe you should find a different job.
If you're actual QA, your job won't go away because you SHOULD be able to test things at a level that is more thorough than the average player. But if you're a playtester, you're the game industry equivalent to a janitor.
Dominic Perez
>noooooooooooooooo you can't just let people test games
>People taking OPs post at face value It is funny that the Epic shill poster has made these types of posts completely unironically.
Hunter Powell
It's very good bait though, you have to admit. He barely even mentions Epic until the very end and at that point people are already ready to post in the thread to shit on playtesters.
Jordan Cruz
Valve never went IPO and their core management are all talented people who work for fun. They all literally have more money than they know what to do with and only go to work because they enjoy the work. You can't pay people enough money to care. This is why big companies like EA always fail-- they replace the passionate for the money-grubbing corporate climbers.
John Long
>playtesters finally get fucked Too bad we can't spit on them on their way out
