Alpha

• The alpha phase consists of a game that can be played from beginning to end. Although most major features will be usable, some assets may only be temporary in nature. At this point, testers are mainly concerned with ensuring that a game works at all, not necessarily with how well it works.
  
  

Beta

• Once a game reaches the beta phase, it is a nearly complete product. All features and assets should be permanently integrated, and all major bugs should have been resolved. Therefore, beta testing mainly consists of fine-tuning what has already been created. A beta phase may be closed, meaning that the developer or publisher uses its own testers, or open, meaning that the beta is open to the public. Open betas are common among multiplayer games, especially massively multiplayer online games.
  
  

Gold

• At this point, a game has been deemed ready for retail release. This does not necessarily mean that all bugs have been resolved. Because almost every game platform now has the ability to access the Internet, noncritical bugs are often left alone to be resolved by patches later, as has long been the case for PC games.
  
  

Bug and Glitch Testing

• A tester's most important job is to ensure that a game works smoothly. To do this, testers have to push a game's limits, often playing the game in ways it was not intended to be played, in order to ensure that it still functions smoothly. Once a tester discovers a bug, she then has to try to re-create the bug in order to narrow down its possible causes, and then pass that information along to the developers.
  
  

Other Forms of Testing

• QA testers are not only responsible for finding bugs. They may also be tasked with balance testing, or ensuring that game isn't too hard or too easy; compatibility testing, or verifying that a game runs properly on different computers; compliance testing, which is ensuring that a game adheres to a hardware developer's specifications; or localization testing, or confirming that a game has been properly converted from use in one region for another, which may involve checking all text for proper translation.