A Survey of Video Game Testing

TL;DR

This survey reviews current practices in video game testing, highlighting reliance on manual methods and the need for automation to improve quality and reduce costs, while noting challenges in generalizing techniques across game types.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing game testing processes and emphasizes the importance of developing automated testing methods for better quality assurance.

Findings

Game developers mainly use manual play-testing.

Current testing lacks automation, limiting efficiency.

Automation could enhance game quality and reduce costs.

Abstract

Video-game projects are notorious for having day-one bugs, no matter how big their budget or team size. The quality of a game is essential for its success. This quality could be assessed and ensured through testing. However, to the best of our knowledge, little is known about video-game testing. In this paper, we want to understand how game developers perform game testing. We investigate, through a survey, the academic and gray literature to identify and report on existing testing processes and how they could automate them. We found that game developers rely, almost exclusively, upon manual play-testing and the testers' intrinsic knowledge. We conclude that current testing processes fall short because of their lack of automation, which seems to be the natural next step to improve the quality of games while maintaining costs. However, the current game-testing techniques may not generalize to different types of games.