What Is a Beta Test Games: A Job?

Beta is weird word, it could be a greek letter or a two syllable nonsense word.  Anyway, the word beta in beta game tester just means that you get to play games before anybody else.  This is because the games haven’t been released to the public yet and you get dibbs on playing it first. 

The catch is that your gaming is not for purposeless fun and enjoyment.  Your purpose of gaming as a beta game tester is to examine the game and play with around until you find bugs and glitches in the game.  Some Game testers go really deep into playing around with these bugs in the game.  When you run into them you have to note the exact location of where and when.  This is to make sure the programmer can fix the bug with accuracy. 

Sometimes (or always) this is easier said than done.  The reason for that is that some bugs are not obvious or easily seen or accessed on the surface.  In other words, you have to really digg down to find them.  For instance, you may go around with your character in the game bumping into every (NPC) you see, Non Person Character, or into inanimate objects and wait and see what happens.  It may have to be that when you bump into a parked car you run into a bug and get stuck. 

However, what if you tried to bump into it again and you don’t get stuck? Well, you have to investigate and know your stuff so that you know exactly what you’re talking about.  It may be that you have to jump over the car and then run into it from the back in order to get to that bug and get your character stuck.  It may be that you tried running into the car from every direction imaginable until you finally are able to recreate a particular bug. 

So this can be hard to enjoy, but if you love video games you’ll be able to handle it.  After all, this line of work might be better than flipping burgers (no offense to the burger flippers out there) but this is pretty chill type of work.  Just make sure you don’t get lost in the crazy world of video games. 

By the way, you don’t have to be super freak gamer that plays for 24 hours straight without eating or visiting the bathroom (yuck!), you could just be an average gamer that plays a few hours here and there.  Although you could definitely score lots of video gamer testing jobs if you’re a freak super gamer guy. 

Anyway, it just comes down to doing some basic video gameplay and communicating or reporting to your superiors (and meeting any deadlines that they give you).  And you definitely want to be patient to play games from all kinds of different points of views and perspectives. 

If you grew up with video games you are extremely lucky because you can understand things that some people might not.  For instance basic navigation knowledge, like knowing that the analogue stick is coordinated to move the character in a particular direction and simple things like that which nobody ever thinks about. 

You may be part of the multitudes of people who wish they can get a beta test gamer job.  If so, check out this game tester page to find out how to get the cheat codes for game tester jobs in real life.