Testing videogames is a challenging job, and it's only becoming more challenging as games get bigger and more complex. What really makes the job tricky, however, is covering for the work of three other testers while pretending you have a full team to the developer that contracted the work. That's the kind of thing a number of QA developers say they were directed to do while testing major games at a large third-party testing house.
. Șupeală offered invaluable assistance in researching this story. Quantic was also investigated by the Romanian outlet,The employees I spoke to describe an environment where Quantic was constantly operating beyond its means, accepting more projects than it had the capacity for, and stretching its staff too thinly between them.
Several of the employees we spoke to mentioned being told by management to avoid talking about how many years they'd worked in the industry when communicating with CD Projekt employees, and they agreed that the Polish developer was not getting the level of experience it paid for with its QA team at Quantic. They said that CDPR contacted Quantic several times about the team's underwhelming performance.
Quantic was one of several quality assurance teams to work on Cyberpunk 2077, including QLOC S.A. and CDPR's in-house team, but the fact remains that Quantic's mismanagement left a third of Cyberpunk's gameplay QA workforce struggling to fulfill its basic obligations. The degree of understaffing on any given project was not a static situation. Games would undergo rounds of testing, and the teams handling them would be at various capacities at different stages. At one point in development, a project may be at or close to capacity, then return for another round but this time handled by a skeleton crew.
"I was a lead tester in contact with clients and I had to do that [lie about their team's size]," a former lead told us."I have done that dozens of fucking times." They found the experience distasteful, but say they did it due to a lack of other career prospects, especially at the height of the pandemic.
CDPROJEKTRED thinks it's standard practice to lie to their shareholders and customers about the performance and stability of their games as well.
As someone who works in QA this article hits
They stole all the bug fixes.
Gaming journalism 🤡
Lying about team size and using other peoples accounts to write up bugs to keep up the charade. Such incredible dishonesty. 🤦
I think What Hurts cyberpunk the Most was being on multi-consoles and PC at the same time. If the game would have been on only Xbox x and PlayStation 5 as well as PC I think the game would have launched in a much better state.
Well yeah of course, they're tryna sell a service/product, they're gonna oversell it, always, any company you try and get a service from is always gonna try and oversell it, especially at scales like this
Nothing new... this happens every single time a consultancy sells 'Senior qa' cvs. Common scam from companies. I remember an old company I worked at sold a dev team and it was just 1 guy doing everything.
It's a 'standard practice' in overall outsourcing
They did Saints Row as well.
Good thing i did not went there. And very sad to hear this.
It's 'standard practice' to lie to your client/customer. I'd say that's a shock but the games industry and full of cheats. Players all the way up to the corporate overlords.
Late to the party again PC Gamer youtubers had already done detailed in depth reports on this months ago.