This article read like sour grapes. He talks about the game industry as a whole, but is entirely limited by his bottom-rung position as a game tester. Pretty much every hardcore gamer on the planet has a wet-dream of playing video games for a living, like he said, it's an awesome job. He got paid to play video games. Then he wonders why the pay is low and they aren't valued? Well, because they could find a million people to replace him, who would probably even be willing to work for less. Sorry, but I'd say most people are naive if they think "playing video games" is going to be a solid career for a lifetime, unless you compete at the top of your game and can consistently take down tournament purses, playing video games sadly isn't a viable career for the long term... though I know that there's millions of people out there who have a dream of doing exactly that... so, that's why you get shitty jobs, shitty treatment, and shitty pay.

The market is volatile though, because one flop can mean half the company gets laid off. It's the nature of the business unfortunately. But these game studios can do what they want, because everyone and there brother wants to work in the video game industry. And if you're nothing more than a "tester", you have ZERO skills that are really valuable, and you have nothing that they can't train someone else to do.

QA testers at my work all make well over $60k, and most of them are in the $80k range, good benefits, full time and secure employment... but guess what? QA'ing and testing financial software isn't as cool as playing video games all day, so it doesn't attract the 20-30 something entitled crowd.