Quality Assurance may be temporary by nature because of the lack of understanding/regard of the vital nature of test in software development. The term QA is in itself a misnomer in the game industry where test simply reports and assures nothing. If I'm wrong please point me to a press release for a game that got delayed 6 months because QA didn't think it was fun, or felt it had too many bugs and had the power to block the release.

If a game company truly had QA they would certainly not be 90% temporary. But, I guess a lot of the industry lately seems temporary doesn't it?

Adam, great testers can become game designers or producers. It takes a lot of effort and hard work to get from a tester to a role that really matters - but its possible!

A producer is the first and the most important tester and he gets to decide (at least in theory :) ) whether the game gets postponed or not. If he doesn't listen to his QA team than something is wrong!

As you mentioned you've seen 3 bad testers and I good tester. Bad testers simply go through the use cases and mark checkboxes. Sorry to say but this kind of testers are expandable and very easy to replace. This is the reason they get 8-10$/hour.

If a tester really tries to make the game better and provides good and realistic feedback along with ideas how to make it better he can really go far with his career in making games.

QA is a tough position to manage, especially in wireless, it takes time, patience, extensive traning, and a steep experience curve, it is not merely mash buttons and go, the members in QA work to understand game logic, functionality, balance it with creating a compelling user experience, grammer/text, internationalization, proper documentation, the list goes on, and if the QA teams are top notch, you often find them taking on many of the producer roles. Often over shadowed in the business environment because they are considered "nice to haves" though the landscape is changing, as Lead countries such as US, have customers with very high expectations now, and the competitive environment is that much more sensitive to quality now in these rough times, we can expect larger organizations to realize when its too late that their product quality suffers and their customer base begins to rant and rave, and I would expect to see QA as a critical part of the Development processes as well as improving processes between varying product milestones (In otherwords part of the value-chain). I also want to add that outsourcing for QA services is another big challenge in itself... QA members internal and permament are most likely to enhance product quality, than outsourcing or seeking contract work, as these members will do whats stated on paper, and then go. In a sense QA demands creative and outside thinking that normally permanent bodies would spend the effort and enthusiasm to do.

I was a Senior QA Lead there about 11 years ago and am absolutely shocked by this development. SCEA QA in Foster City was always the best and most focused (especially in the Mark Pentek days) QA department I have ever witnessed even today. There are a lot of great people on that list, a couple are even former roommates of mine who I still consider good friends though we haven't spoken in awhile. I am currently unemployed myself and know it SUCKS especially before Christmas. I wish everyone effected all the best of luck!!