Testing games should be fun!
Akash and Idan here -
You might know us from some of our greatest hits such as, “taking out the trash” and “please brush your teeth.” When we’re not reporting to our real bosses (our kids and partners), we’ll be building a new venture we’re calling Epoch. We want to make testing games as fun as making and playing them, and we’ll also employ Machine Learning to do it!
Over the last couple of years, we’ve talked to all sorts of folks in the game development world and learned just how painful game testing can be. We also both saw this first hand when we worked together at Sandbox VR pre-pandemic. Notwithstanding, when testing or Quality Assurance (QA) is not done correctly, it can completely derail a game’s prospects, effectively killing years of effort from endlessly talented teams.
If you share our passion to help people make better games faster with more efficiently, hit us up! We plan to help make the game industry a better place and help bring the creations of tireless teams to life in the process. We don’t care where you live and what you did before — if this resonates with you, we’ll meet you where you are.
To pursue this mission, we’re capitalized by investors such as Prefix Capital, South Park Commons, and Atypical Ventures, alongside a host of stellar firms and angels set on seeing the game industry continue to flourish.
There are over 3 billion gamers globally, over 40% of the entire human population! In a few short decades, games have gone from niche to mainstream, which should come as no surprise to anyone that’s grown up with them. After all, games are fun and help bring people together in both structured and unstructured ways resulting in surprising, delightful, and often unpredictable experiences.
The importance of games came into stark focus during the pandemic. Meeting in person became more difficult, and many turned to virtual worlds to spend time with each other. Further, we’re starting to witness games evolving into more: social and financial networks, even alternative worlds people inhabit virtually with laws and economies. We won’t go as far as “going down the rabbit hole” of metaverse/web3 here, but we are both in awe of the explosion of creativity as related to crypto and NFTs and anticipate massive implication and acceleration to the gaming world as well.
Making games can also be fun, and arguably building new games is core to the human experience, as anyone that has spent any time with kids will know. However, while making games can be fun, it’s not entirely clear how to make sure that other people will enjoy playing them. The power law is brutal and real, both for the silly games children invent, as well as monster budget AAA titles.
The world of game development relies on testing /QA to ensure that when a game is launched, it pleases the intended audience and works as intended with limited bugs. No small task, especially as games become more expansive and complex. Games continue to scale from 10s to 100s if not 1000s of simultaneous players, and games need to chase the moving target of cutting-edge hardware and technology.
Simply managing and orchestrating such efforts is a massive undertaking. Indeed, we came to learn that many AAA titles require millions of hours of testing per year of development, meaning the coordination of thousands of people and unspoken amounts of data transfer. Millions of hours may sound like a lot, yet games are often expected to deliver 40–60 hours of gameplay and to belabor the AAA example, with average budgets of $60–80M — anything less than 1M units sold will hardly lead a breakeven, let alone stellar outcome. A million hours of testing is a drop in the bucket relative to the hours your game is expected to perform (and on a much more diverse set of target platforms).
Automate it! Bad news — games aren’t so easy to automate. We collected 100s of unique pain points and horror stories from the industry on everything that goes wrong when you attempt to automate game testing, justification enough to rely on armies of testing/QA “bums in seats” as they’re affectionately known in the industry.
For many, the prospect of playing games all day sounds like a dream job. After all, if playing games is a blast, and so is making games, then testing games should be the best job in the world! Many QA folks and testers enter the industry with these high hopes, only to find day-to-day testing is more of a routine grind. Often, test plans will include thousands of tests that need to be repeated over and over again for every minor change.
This is why much of the game industry rightfully venerates testing and QA folks - it’s critical work and can often be a thankless job. Yet, without QA, games won’t work as intended on release — sometimes in painful and public ways.
The idea for Epoch was sparked by recognizing that testing/QA, a critical workhorse of the game development industry, does not receive enough attention. We spent countless hours over the course of nearly two years talking to anyone in the game world that we could find about QA/testing in the industry. From heads of strategy to studio heads to team members building games. It was clear that people want better solutions and processes. Both of us have been part of world-class companies, and it was off-putting to us to find that the status quo was mired in clunky old-school processes. That stinks.
So, like… maybe it’s time for someone to make this not stink?
We are on a mission to help people make better games faster with more efficiency — on the way, we also want to make the game industry a better place. If you’ve read this far, perhaps this resonates with you, and if so we’d love to hear from you: idan@epochml.com, akash@epochml.com.
Unsurprisingly, we’ve found no lack of folks in the industry hungry for better ways to augment and empower their testing and QA efforts. Everyone is seeking quality of life improvements across the board, from studio heads to the individuals actually doing the testing.
We are already working with some stellar industry partners, including studios willing to suffer through our buggy early prototypes and PoCs. The pain is real. Both studios and publishers are actively looking for ways to further empower their testers and developers. Further, folks are excited about the prospect of improved processes and the ability to automate the routine using ML, letting the humans focus on the novel!
Over the coming months, we’ll share more about what we’re building and how we’re tackling these hairy problems. In the meantime, if you’re excited about being involved in our mission or if you might benefit from better QA/Testing solutions for your game project or studio, give us a holler!
Akash and Idan,
Co-founders of Epoch
