New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why is the gaming industry resistant to automated tests?

Ask HN: Why is the gaming industry resistant to automated tests?
2 by sovietmudkipz | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I work at bigcorp working on applications built on top of kubernetes/public cloud as the target platform. One thing I’ve been impressed by at work is how writing automated tests is paramount. The “Growing Software guided by Tests,” “Unit Testing: principles and practices,” and other media/books are recommended by engineers to help others get up to speed writing good tests and good software. What is a good test, and what is a waste of time to test? This is a constant discussion and I love it. As a hobby, I write video games because why not. One thing I’ve noticed is how different attitudes are on automated testing. It’s highly discouraged because ‘games don’t lend themselves to being tested’ apparently. It’s just as amazing to see how resistant this slice of the overall IT industry is to something the rest of the industry has considered very good. This culminates for me in two anecdotes. First, trying to find out what a good test looks like for video games is very, very, very challenging. There aren’t content creators noodling on or presenting findings on this subject. Not many articles, not many videos, not much content describing good tests. If there are industry veterans who do testing right, they seem to be keeping that information far, far away from the public. Perhaps even they see this as a market differentiator? My experience leads me to think this is something very few explore, and even fewer share. Second: Unity put together a thing in Fall of 2020 called “open game project” where the idea was to create an open source game as a community. The game, now called “chop chop,” has a series of YouTube livestreams where the Unity devs discuss the project. The super interesting thing to me is that within 72 hours of project start, someone put together a PR to try and introduce tests. A Unity forum thread was referenced where discussion occurred. When I read through the discussion, I got the sense that the Unity devs did not want tests in the project. “Too early,” “too complex,” and other blockers existed at that time, apparently. Fast forward to the project end— still no tests. Why is the gaming industry so resistant to automated tests, especially when compared with the overall IT industry?