The value of manual QA in video games
This might sound a little “old-school”, but… we believe the human factor is irreplaceable in game QA. The past few years have shown us a new face of digitalisation: automation. And it has taken a seat at the table in almost every industry, ours included.
But this isn’t a story about humans versus machines. Automation has earned its place in modern testing: it handles a high volume of repetitive checks, and it’s fast, as long as the scripts are written well.
Still, as in so many other fields, automation in game testing can only take you so far. Once you move past the mechanical layer it excels at, you reach the thing that matters most in testing, and in gaming as a whole: the player’s experience.
And when it comes to the player’s experience, manual QA truly shines. Because only manual testers can:
Provide an honest, creative feedback.
Behaviour, design, look and feel: this is territory only a human brain can properly evaluate. A good tester goes further than just running a checklist: we design test cases, execute them, and crucially, go off-script the moment something doesn’t play right. That’s exactly how you catch the defects automation was never told to look for.
After all, manual testers are the first official players of your game; and seasoned ones, at that. Anyone who’s spent real time in this industry can probably recall a build that got rebalanced, a difficulty spike that got softened, or even a story beat that got reworked because a tester flagged it. That feedback loop, that constant communication between testers and developers, is the element that brings value to most games.
Adapt to unexpected results or explore unexpected turns.
Game development is, at its core, a deeply creative process; and like any creative process, it moves through constant iteration. Builds change, mechanics get reworked, entire ideas get scrapped and rebuilt, sometimes overnight. That churn is exactly why it pays to have testers who can adapt on the spot.
This is also where exploratory testing earns its keep. Instead of following a fixed script, testers put themselves in the player’s shoes and roam the game the way a real player would: poking at systems, combining them in ways nobody designed for, wandering off the intended path. It’s this unscripted curiosity that surfaces the bugs a pre-written test would walk straight past.
Get the feel of a game.
Ask a designer what matters most and many will point to something almost impossible to measure: game feel. It’s the tactile sensation of controlling something on screen:
whether a jump feels floaty or weighty,
whether a hit lands with weight or thuds emptily,
whether the controls disappear entirely and simply become the character.
It’s shaped through rounds of playtesting and iteration, and it’s one of the biggest reasons a player stays with a game instead of quietly uninstalling it.
Now, no automated assertion will ever tell you a jump feels floaty. There’s no unit test for “this attack doesn’t feel like it connects.” And yet, most players are passionate and very thorough: they do feel when something’s off.
That’s why it’s important to have someone who can name what’s off, before it reaches players. A good manual tester sits with the game and translates a vague “this feels wrong” into a reproducible report with the right context attached.
Bring a trained eye on the interface.
When testing, we create test designs, detect bugs, and execute designs to get the desired output. Sorry, we can’t help it, it’s the game tester in us, but we notice everything: when it’s two pixels off, when a menu flow feels clumsy, when a loading state leaves the player staring at nothing, wondering if the game froze.
Understand the chaos of mobile testing.
Just take a second to think about everything that happens to a game on an actual phone: you wander in and out of Wi-Fi, a call comes in mid-boss-fight, three other apps are quietly eating memory in the background, someone force-closes and reopens the app just to see what happens. These messy, real-world interruptions are for now, impossible to anticipate through a script, yet it’s something testers can run through in minutes, and with less effort.
So what about automation?
We’ve spent this whole article making the case for people, so let’s be fair to the machines: automation can be a good tool when you know exactly what you’re pointing it at. It’s fast, it’s tireless, and it never gets bored on the thousandth run.
The catch is that automation is only as good as the thinking behind it.
At Quantic Lab, people come first.
We simply know where each type of testing belongs. Automation handles the repetitive, the mechanical. But a game is a living, shifting, deeply humane thing. The moment it comes down to how it feels to play, someone has to actually play it; which is why manual QA is here to stay.