Quality Assurance (QA)

Quality Assurance (QA for short) is the process of making sure that the game works in every situation. It's the whole system you put in place to ensure that a game meets all the performance and reliability standards that players expect.

QA can include automated testing, like running performance benchmarks of your game on different platforms, and extensive manual testing, either done by yourself or with the help of playtesters or specialized QA testers.

When we talk about quality assurance, we look for anything that degrades the player's experience or that should not happen. This includes crashes, bugs that lock players out of the game, stutters, freezes, and save data corruption, to name a few.

A QA specialist checks for all these problems before shipping the game. If you are working with a studio or publisher, they may hire specialists for you. If you work alone, you may be in charge of testing, or you may run opt-in beta releases or long early access periods to give yourself time to iterate and improve the game before its release.