What is Alpha Testing in the Game Industry?

A lot of people show interest every year in becoming official game testers – on the payroll of major developers around the globe. However, what exactly will you be doing when you get that job? It’s a good question, because not all testing is actually fun – in fact, it can be downright tedious when a game first starts development.

This is the first true phase of the game that can be “played”. Months and potentially years of development are finally put into an operational build that can be played and subsequently tested. The testing in this phase, however, is not just looking for tiny little bugs that might annoy gamers. It’s designed to act as a rough overview of the game, allowing testers to go through the content and look for bugs that can potentially crash or break the game.

It’s like crashing a car as many ways as possible so you can enhance the safety features. Your job as an alpha tester will be to play the game with an intense focus on bugs that will cause fatal errors and failures in the software. If it completely shuts down, crashes the hardware or worse yet, causes actual damage to the hardware, you not only report the bug, you spend hours recreating the bug so the developers have as much data as possible with which to fix it.

During this testing phase, the lead gaming tester will start developing a bug database for issues that plague a new game. That database will be updated whenever a new bug is found and whenever a fix is tentatively provided by the game’s programmers.

How to Be an Alpha Tester

While beta testing is occasionally made public, alpha testing is always in house. Only hired employees are used to test the game in its infancy as there are very specific requirements for how the game can be tested, what you should look for, how to fill in your reports, and ultimately, how to respond to bug fixes from the programmers.

All that work requires hours of training and practice which can only be provided by the developers of the game. Even if you’ve worked as a tester on a previous game, a new title will usually have its own Alpha testing protocols to follow.

So, to become an Alpha tester, you must develop credentials that can get you into the gaming industry, including but necessarily requiring a degree in programming or game development, and special training with game testing on your own. It seems like a lot of work, but for those looking to land a dream job in game testing, it’s very doable with the right attitude.