Over many years in game development, I’ve seen QA get treated like trash and expected to be grateful just to be a part of game development. Parties hosted for “devs” where QA was excluded. Catered lunch for everyone *except* QA. Companies where QA was *literally not allowed through the front door*.

I’ve also seen QA departments that are hot garbage, staffed by folks who were barely “professional”, who generated unintelligible bugs, or who wanted to be game designers and didn’t understand what the job entailed.

BOTH are symptoms of leadership that doesn’t value QA, and both are faults caused by that *leadership*, not by the QA department.

Way back in the day on the Sims, there was a phenomenal QA dept that worked tightly with engineers & designers, that knew the product and the players inside and out. When Maxis was acquired by EA, that whole team was fired, and replaced by people they hired at a *literal sausage party*. Like, “here, have free sausages & apply for QA positions”.

The bugs we got went from being helpful feedback that closed the loop on development to useless trash, and the supposed “cost savings” was totally burned on the extra time everyone in the development pipeline needed to spend to get the QA team back up to some minimum level of competence.

QA is a critical part of the development team. Hire high-quality QA people and treat them well, and you will:

1.) Save money EVERYWHERE in the development pipe
2.) Create a much, much better product
3.) Make your engineers’ & designers’ lives a lot easier.

Bring QA into your development process early, reviewing designers’ output, because they will break design *documents* just as thoroughly as they’ll break code. It’ll be 100x cheaper AND your designers will start to think like QA folks, which will make them *better designers*.

This is a no-brainer, folks. There’s no downside. All you need to do is not be elitist ding-dongs.