Is There Really That Much Money in Video Game Testing?

A lot of sites will say that video game testing is an 18 billion dollar a year industry and the most basic tester make about $30 per hour.

The question that comes to mind when you hear this is: how much of this is actually true? Well the part about it being a multi-billion a year industry is a proven fact. The part about starting out testers making that much, really on a lot of factors. Let's start off with the common question, why are companies willing to pay you to play video games? Well that question is very easy, in any business there is a thing called field research.
During this research companies test out their products for quality assurance.

These companies have to do this because if they don't there is a chance of releasing a product with bugs. Imagine if you spend $60 on Halo2 only to find that it's full of bugs, your weapon won't reload sometimes, your enemies are sometimes invincible, or there is level that is just unreachable.

How would you feel about buying Halo3? Video game companies don't want this to happen so they hire people like us to play these games before they are released to report any bugs that they game might have. How much they pay you really depends on several factors.
How old you are is the first thing they look at. When they develop a game they usually have a target audience in mind, for example if they are making a game with a bunch of blood and guts their target audience is probably not going to be anyone under the age of 17. This means that they will pay more to people that are between 17-21 because that's their target audience.

They will then look at where you live.

This is something that is not as important as age but it's not something they will overlook.

Where you are located has a lot to do with your interest. Sometimes a company wants to know what a particular region is interested in. They will use this data later when they are marketing for future games.
The last thing they will take a look at is what console you're using, they will usually have a pre determined number of tester they want to hire, if they know that the PlayStation 3 version is perfect then they will only hire people using Xbox 360 consoles.

All of these things take into affect when determining how much you are going to get paid. Getting paid at least $30 an hour is very easily possible if you are in all three of these categories.