Despite record player counts with Season 16,Apex Legendsseems to be having some difficulties of late. Not only is the game’s mobile port being shut down alongside the cancelation of an unannounced single-player entry, but Apex is now contributing to the industry’s systemic mistreatment of QA testers. According toKotaku,EAnot only laid off 200 QA testers at their Baton Rouge office but did so over an unscheduled Zoom meeting at 8am with no prior warning to testers or supervising staff. The same article contains an excerpt from an EA spokesperson, who said that the publisher believes the firing will help with “expanding the distribution” of their QA team to “increase the hours per week we’re able to test.”
This is pretty grim news, but it’s not without precedent. Not only have a good many studios been carrying out layoffs, but Quality Assurance is an aspect of the industry that has historically gotten the brunt of any disrespect going around. QA has long been cast as ‘getting paid to play videogames all day’ — a reputation that, whilst detrimental to gaming as a whole, is an advantage to the industry as it gives them license to treat QA testers poorly. Hopefully,the new wave of QA unionization will go some way to fixing this.
However, with this cutting of QA staff we should look into what this means not only for Apex but for live service and AAA games in general. With the increasing quantity of games rushed to market, and the live service gold rush spurred on by the last decade, it looks like publishers may be relying more and more on their playerbase to effectively do the QA work for them, which isn’t good for the quality of the game, the players, or the people who do valuable but under-appreciated work as QA testers.
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There’s no denying that AAA games have a recent history of being somewhat bug-ridden upon release.Fallout 76,Anthem,Cyberpunk 2077— take your pick. This can’t at all be blamed on QA testing or individual designers but simply the fact of how the AAA industry increasingly seems to work, particularly with how QA is seemingly becoming more and more sidelined.
A prime example of this would beActivision— cutting a third of their QA staff at Raven Software in 2021 and laying off swathes of QA workers among the 800 cut in 2019. According toKotaku, QA testers working onCall of Duty: Black Ops 4were faced with crunch and neglect. With Activision’sWarzone 2.0being at the head of the ongoing live service gold rush, their attitude towards QA is emblematic of the industry as a whole — with EA joining this barrage of layoffs and mistreatment towards the sector.
This is where we circle back to the idea of responsibility for Quality Assurance trickling down to the players. With the live service model being the trend of the day, post-release updates and patches are to be expected. Not only this, but the fact they’re constantly online experiences means that they’ll always have an active player base making constant posts on social media whenever a bug is found. If there’s a bug in a game like Apex, chances are that it’s archived online. By that token, the more popular the game, the more players there are, and the more data, discussions, and community feedback the devs have to draw upon. In that context, the correlation between Apex’s new heights of popularity and the lay-offs can’t be ignored.
Regardless of what EA plans to do with their restructuring efforts, there’ll be a time lag before their QA team for Apex can recover. During that time, the game’s playerbase will be the de facto QA team. You could say the community is already primed for this function considering that a big part of Season 16’s hype included the patch notes' massive slate of bug fixes — fixes that the community have clamored for.
But there are myriad problems with letting the buck for QA stop at a game’s playerbase. Not to say that those playing Apex aren’t capable of finding more than a fair share of bugs — that’s evident from a cursory glance in the community’s direction — but finding bugs is just the first step of QA. QA involves utilizing the scientific method to hit at the root cause of a bug, replicating the scenario where a bug pops up with all manner of variations many times until conclusive cause-and-effect can be found.
The current AAA games industry has essentially created a situation where it’s over-reliant on players finding bugs, rather than ensuring that a game releases in such a state that bugs don’t blight the experience thatplayers pay for. That’s another key thing here: QA Testers get paid to help ensure that the game customers pay money for is in the best possible technical state upon release, whereas increasingly we’re seeing AAA games treat their players like (non-consensual) Early Access adopters–along for the ride of actually getting the game to a good playable state.
2023 has demonstrated that the live service space is absolutely brutal, with titles such asApex Legends Mobile,Knockout City,Rumbleverse, and more being shutdown or having their shutdown announced. Games are either being rushed to market without the needed polish or are taking too long between content updates to secure that polish. Both avenues are receiving similar fates. None of the above justifies the mistreatment of QA or thelive service cycle of constant content primed to induce crunch culture, both of which are terrible.
It turns out that this story about the mistreatment of 200 QA testers, who were laid off without warning at 8am for some myopic pursuit of corporate restructuring, has exposed the difficulties the AAA market finds itself habitually trapped in. The lax attitude towards quality control that is increasingly becoming commonplace for the industry is trickling responsibility down to players — putting an unpaid and unknowing pool of gamers at the heart of implementing polish.
Amid the great success of Apex’s Season 16, EA’s decision here is one of immense hubris that reflects an industry that sees QA as a place to cut costs — as an inessential aspect of the development process. It’s less that EA are flying too close to the sun and more that they’ve left the bloody atmosphere. It would not surprise me to see this disregard for QA come to bite the industry in the back.
