The main impact of video game testers is to provide real user feedback from testing on real devices and under real world conditions. It’s important to be able to predict and understand user behavior and create ongoing ideas for the game creators. You need to have a crowd of people that have a passion for gaming, particularly for the type of game under test.
There are 5 key principles to manage crowd testing:
- Include a variety of crowd testers – a greater variety of testers in your crowd will provide more feedback, increased coverage, improved, faster testing and finding more significant bugs on the project. For example, in online Poker games, the test team could include poker players, teenagers, functional testers, gaming experts, statisticians and even my Mom. It would be valuable to recognize who identified the most important and effective defects.
- Focus on achievement and exercise functionality – The defects of a game are often detected when the tester’s objective is to use of all the games functions or to pass the next level. The testers strive to exercise much more capabilities and options in the games. It could prove beneficial to be able to identify which function of the game is the most useful and how to convince the end user to complete the game.
- Leverage the user feedback – the key feedback from video game testing is what the end user will think about your game. For example, it would be useful to identify that level 47 of Candy Crush is too easy and yet it is impossible to pass level 101. It’s also important to understand how much time the user will spend on level 10, how to give them the right prize, how the user wants to spend their money and how the game creator will strategize updates.
- Create a competitor survey – the crowd tester is not biased in regards to your game and will provide you with an insight to different issues experienced in other, similar games. You could be surprised to learn what everyone thinks about your game in comparison to others. Maybe you will add, change or remove several functions just because others have identified some functionality to be more appropriate.
- Use your loyalty – your gaming community could effectively be your crowd. Using your members in old versions and other games to test your new version/game will provide ideas and feedback about the impact of changing features from the original game.
Qualitest’s managed crowd testing for gaming services: As the world’s largest pure play testing & QA company with more than 2500 professional testers, we have successfully delivered cost efficient crowd solutions bespoke to our client requirements.
Qualitest has been working with the leading crowd providers for a number of years and as an early adopter we have helped the concept to develop and have the skills and expertise to leverage the best from the crowd. Our managed crowd testing model for the gaming industry comprises video game industry veterans and our best testers. We will provide you with feedback from any required target audience and understand your players. We love to test and like everyone we love to play games.
