QA used to be a relatively big deal for a some companies way back. At Square for instance, a lot of the major designers and directors on their SNES games and later got started as simple bugtesters and playtesters for the NES games. Treating QA so disposably not only has the obvious effect of not thoroughly bugtesting, but it probably closes off a big avenue for potential talent to enter the industry.
From what I hear, Nintendo's playtesters are expected to give feedback on what they thought of the game in addition to reporting bugs. In the leaked Gold/Silver documents back in the gigaleak there was correspondence between Game Freak staff and Nintendo's playstesters who were assigned to playtest GS to help GF out, and Masuda got really salty over them giving design advice or saying they thought something was lame, to the point he whined to his contact at Nintendo to tell them to only report bugs and nothing else.
If I were anyone at Nintendo, I'd tell the chink to fuck off and make a game that the QA's wouldn't want to give negative feedback for. Crazy concept.
Edit: OR you can engage in the feedback. Understand why someone would speak on the DESIGN of the game. Give them your perspective. ENGAGE. Then maybe see why certain things perhaps could change or stay the same. Don't close off that loop. This explains a lot for Pokémon's gameplay evolution.
QA and play testers are not the same thing. They can have overlap, but they are supposed to be different jobs.
QA testers generally focus on finding and reproducing bugs, crashes, compliance issues, and making sure the build is stable.
Play testers on the other hand are tasked to provide design and player experience feedback, whether something is fun, confusing, or needs balancing.
- QA = functionality/stability
- Playtesting = design/experience
They also tend to operate at different stages of development, usually in different environments since many companies have their own QA department or preferred service provider, while a "play tester" normally is just a random person brought in for a short period to play test the game. Often that aren't even paid, or if they are it's like a gift card.
Along with all of this, just because someone is QA doesn't mean they're the target audience for the game, or hell even interested in games.
To a lot of people jobs are just jobs, so while there might be an expectation for a game developer to be interested in games, that same motivation might not translate to being a QA.
I say this as someone whose worked with quite a few people in IT/development that have absolutely no interest in technology or internet shit outside of what they need to do for work lol.
So for example, the 42 y/o QA tester whose interests revolve around vehicles and fishing, might not have the best feedback on how "fun" the current Pokémon battle mechanics are.
On the flip side, the 24 y/o QA tester whose a furry pedophile, but who was too retarded to become a game dev, likely isn't the best person to listen to about the designs of Pokémon in the game.
I won't even get into outsourcing, but suffice to say, we don't need input from jeets on Pokémon.
