More or less by chance I had an opportunity to attend the first day of gamescom this year, Europe’s biggest video game related trade show. The entertainment area where consumers get a glimpse of new games was a blast, as expected. But the business area open only to trade visitors was particularly interesting to me, because there were a fair amount of test companies present.
It seems as if the games industry on the whole takes their testing a lot more seriously than many other sectors of the software world. That shouldn’t be particular surprising, given that games are probably the most abundantly distributed shrink-wrap software still in existence. When you cannot rely on online updates being available to your customers, testing becomes a crucial part of your business — and the stakes are high in video gaming.
