A Survey of Video Game Testing
This addresses the problem of day-one bugs and inefficiency in game testing for video game developers, but it is incremental as it surveys existing practices without proposing new solutions.
The paper investigated video game testing processes through a survey of academic and gray literature, finding that developers rely heavily on manual play-testing and lack automation, which hinders quality and cost efficiency.
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.