Testing any kind of software is mind numbingly boring. Part of my job is to test our companies software when new updates come out (oddly enough, my job actually has very little to do with IT or computers; not sure how I ended up doing this on occasion). It's incredibly dull - you're sitting there for hours doing the same thing over and over with only the smallest of variances, trying to think up every possible scenario where something could go wrong.

I can't imagine testing games would actually be fun. Sure, you might get a few hours of novelty value playtesting GTAIV, but when it's a bug ridden alpha build and you're told to spend the next eight hours jumping over the same fence from different angles, I can imagine it would wear off fast.

1. Age limit, or age minimum? I doubt there a limit, but the minimum is probably 18.
2. Game studios.
3. Not quite sure
4. I'd guess around 30,000 or so, but that is dependent on how big the company is. And it's not like a steady job, you'll have to jump around to different companies.
5. It'd probably be fun at first, but after the first 5 hours of scouring the whole game world for bugs, it'd get tedious and boring. And you won't be able to enjoy the game in it's completed form, as you've already played through every bit of the broken version.

I recall reading a Penny Arcade about this once. Can't link due to some language, but it went something like this:
Announcer: "Congratulations Anthony Brown! You have been chosen to be the games tester!"
Cut to a cubicle.
boss: "For the next nine months, you'll be playing Dora the Explorer on the PS2 one hundred hours a week. every time it breaks - and it will break - you'll need to write a five page report and start over.
Anthony: "Is there a lunch break, or..."
Boss: "every eight hours your cubicle will be flooded with nutrient-rich sludge."

The moral of the story is that games testing isn't just playing a cool game before its release and bragging about it to your friends.

... or even moaning about how boring it is: I can't imagine they'd let anyone near pre-release titles without them first signing a non-disclosure agreement.

That's because your work does testing wrong. You have a massive scoreboard with an announcer and everything. The person with the highest score (most bugs found) gets to make the person who contributed the most buggy code their slave for a week. Not just a work slave, but a full-on slave. They're given a tent and made to live on the nearest patch of grass to your living area.

I found this article where game testers claim that these QA testing jobs have low pay, bad working conditions, and poor career prospects.. I've never been interested in game testing and I don't know how accurate this article is in regards to the overall market, but I found it an interesting read nonetheless.

http://games.ign.com/articles/122/1221612p1.html

Yeah, I can see how that approach would provide a good amount of motivation.

Depends on the company and how much you're worth (job experience, etc.) In some companies the junior-level testers are interns that make very little money and have little-to-no job security. It's a good way to meet people that might hire you for something better down the road, though. The games industry isn't easy to break into unless you're really talented (and can demonstrate it...likely on your own time), are lucky, or know somebody. Even then a lot of people hate it when they "get there."

Wait... doesn't everyone play games like that? I guess I'm in the wrong line of work!

I actually did do a lot of patch testing when I played DAOC. Lots of moving stuff around, losing things, falling through worlds, getting stuck, redoing the same thing over and over. But you didn't get paid for that, they had a server set up for their players to volunteer to help with bug reporting on their releases. Just from that very limited experience, I'd imagine if you actually want to PLAY a game, this is definitely not the career path for you.

OP, if you take one thing away from this thread, it should be that you'd be spending 900,000 minutes an hour working.

I think there is an opening at Creative Assembly, the guys who make total war. I wouldn't mind that job.

1 - Depends what gaming area you want to go into child/mature, but the best bet is to be over 18 so you are legally able to play every game there is.
2 - You aren't trying now?
3 - Depends what area of testing you want, for coding you'd have to have some sort of certificate in that area, beta testing you'd have to be lucky to be selected I guess.
4 - I've been testing games for a while now and I can tell you it's roughly -￡35 each game I test
5 - Probably not, if you can't hack the bugs in Skyrim/Fallout just now then being a tester would piss you off since it'll be littered with them.