There’s a nasty trend in the industry right now, QA is not taken seriously enough. It’s not a career for people, it’s a step up for people coming out of AIE [Academy of Interactive Entertainment], coming out of Qantm, coming out of wherever. Their first taste of the games industry is a stint in QA for six months on 15 bucks an hour, [where they] knock out some bugs until they’ve been known and hopefully chat it up with a few of the other people and get a job.

According to Slater, QA needs to be taken seriously, not only as a crucial aspect of development, but a career as well. Currently, it’s perceived as a rung on the ladder to a “better” position – one that has nothing to do with QA.

More from Slater after the jump.

As an industry, we need to start promoting the idea of career QA development and that means increases wages and increasing the respect QA get. And that respect will come with the professionalism that actually comes with it being a career.

It’s sad to think QA is not considered a serious career choice. I can imagine testing for bugs all day, playing the same game over and over again, would quickly make you want to play Russian Roulette with a gun that has bullets in every chamber.

Slater wants to change this perception.

These people are there to save our arses … we shouldn’t be writing stuff that we expect to be failed in QA. They are there as the shit kickers at the back – they catch the crap. They can save your life if you treat them nicely.

Slater feels the solution is to provide those in QA with options – a light at the end of the tunnel, something to work towards.

And money.

It’s a big problem in the industry, and it’s just an underappreciated, undervalued and underfinanced area. We need that kind of people and a career path though QA so people stay there – we don’t just lose the experience … and have to get fresh people in again.

Martin Slater – telling us how it is. If only others developers were so honest and open about the real problems facing the industry.

Oh, and Martin: Where’s your developer profile dude? Inquiring minds want to know if you have a love of ye olde furniture too…

With hands firmly clenching his speaker podium, Slater held his ground against a steady bombardment of questions on BioShock. I found his experiences working with Microsoft’s DirectX 10 the most interesting, so I’ve replicated them here from data carefully extracted from my voice recorder:

[DirectX 10] offers your gameplay nothing … DirectX 10, probably for the next three, four, five years is not important to you. Microsoft are going to tell you everything under the sun differently. Everybody under the sun is going to tell you differently.

I’m not sure it offers your visuals anything either, judging from Crysis and its configuration file silliness.

DirectX 10 isn’t all bad though – hey, Microsoft didn’t go to all that trouble for nothing:

You’ve got the business side and you’ve got the games side. The games side, you want to minimise the technology because you want to maximise the amount of time you spend interacting with game design. DirectX 10, for all your game programmers, is a beautiful place.

I can’t help but agree with Slater. I also think people need to start understanding that DirectX 10 and Direct3D 10 are two different things – one is a collection of APIs, while the other is one of those APIs.