[reassembled]

I worked in game testing at two major Japanese game companies in the Bay Area for a few years before switching to doing QA in the video industry. As game testers we’d write up a ton of bug reports but generally only the most egregious crashes and console manufacturer’s standards violations would get fixed (think using the wrong Sony or Microsoft terminology or symbols in the game UI).

By the time most games reached our offices for testing they’d already undergone most of the core testing in Japan or at their developer’s studios. We were essentially just there to make sure last minute bugs didn’t slip through the cracks. Management rarely prioritized gameplay or even functionality bugs to be fixed, unless it was easy to reproduce and clearly prevented overall progress in the game.

We shipped one big fighting game and wrote up a bunch of bugs that clearly showed that online play was nigh-unusable, and nothing got fixed. The game came out and was ripped apart in reviews for the low quality of its net code. But it had a bunch of single player modes that were rock solid so they let the online modes slide. This was a few years before fighting game developers started seriously considering the importance of online play, and taking major steps to improve its quality.