Many years ago, my husband had a co-worker who used to work in the games industry.  Apparently he got an exciting position as an alpha tester for games.  He had to move all the way out of California.  He tested games, but apparently, he wasn't paid enough to afford to live there, so he had to move back to New England when the money ran out.

I'm not really sure who befitted from that arrangement, the guy, surely not, after all he didn't end up making any money and just lost it while playing incomplete buggy games.  The company, well, they paid an awful lot so someone could live in a high cost to live area, instead of being able to support someone living in a lower cost area. 

Surely there is a better way to get alpha testers for games now than this lose/lose arrangement.

Posting on forums, asking.   Some people love to test out new things.  Especially if it's free. No guarantees on the feedback quality this way, but it gets it out there and you'll find out if it works or not.  If you're talking about paying an employee to alpha test, then you got to treat them like an employee you want to keep.  That's just general business practice stuff.  It sounds like that co-worker got scammed by a terrible company to me.

Good luck out there.

Getting random people from the internet to 'test for free' is a pretty risky and frequently terrible approach to testing, especially at when you're in actual alpha builds. 

One of the biggest hurdles in alpha testing is being able to see beyond what is currently there, and visualize your way through the software that could eventually be there. This will also frequently include visualizing multiple options of what could be there, how different features could potentially function, and weighing these options against each other before attempting to proceed down any given road. If you are dealing with alpha build software then you need to have very close control over who is using it, how they're interacting with it, and how well they understand what is actually going on at that stage of software development. 

It is however a sad truth about the industry that testing stages are all too often under valued or completely overlooked during development. Testers are frequently under invested in, used as a screening or entry level position while paying as little as legally possible for it, and commonly allowing staff to 'advance up' from the 'lowly noob work' of testing rather than fostering comprehensive and talented test teams who can tell their own backside from a hole in the ground as far as testing in software development goes. Skimping on QA, especially early on in projects, is kind of a fool's economy due to the risk of bug snowballing effect - The worse the state of the code base, the harder it is to work with, and the longer bugs go on for the harder they are to fix completely. The harder it is to work with the slower the progress on future development is. The slower the progress the more stress coders come under, and the more stressed coders are, which translates into increase likelihood of burnout and turn over. Turn over then translates into even less comprehensive understanding of the project, which compounds the problem of fixing bugs and making progress, and that then risks making the cycle roll over that much faster. 

Over my years in the industry I have seen several multi-million dollar projects in different fields get caught in such death spirals for the want of saving an extra $60-100k a year to put towards additional testing and oversight. "Saving money" on QA is often one of the most expensive choices companies make, and I rather doubt that is going to change any time soon.

That's actually so strange that these days things like that happen to people, and the practices these companies use. 

The only testing i've had experience with and known other do depends on the paltform. Most of which can be arranged through online conferences and using notes or recordings on the subject tested.

If it's that crazy far away, and they still went for the decision to work this out, oh well. 

14 hours ago, Luckless said:

Getting random people from the internet to 'test for free' is a pretty risky and frequently terrible approach to testing, especially at when you're in actual alpha builds.

For what it's worth, if you aren't working on a multi-million dollar project, getting free help on the internet may be your only viable option. However terrible it might be.

19 hours ago, Septopus said:

For what it's worth, if you aren't working on a multi-million dollar project, getting free help on the internet may be your only viable option. However terrible it might be.

My first choice in a 'no budget' setting would be to focus on establishing relationships with other local developers for testing purposes beyond what you can do yourself rather than finding random people from the web willing to 'do it for free'. A simple "Test for Test" service exchange with other small developers hold a higher chance of yielding more useful results, especially during early build cycles.

If you can't build up a network of professional friends to do something like that, then my next choice would be friends/family who can be coached and guided through the process to help you identify issues you missed on your own testing.

Great suggestions @Luckless!  I'm still going to say that at some point, after friends and family and developer cohorts, going to the forums might be a viable step in AN alpha/beta process, especially if your game is online and/or multi-player.  I also wasn't trying to imply you can only get free help online either, just that you can get free help online.  We're not all here because the community holds no value whatsoever.  Free help is just as valuable as is access to those who might help for "not free".. Doing it right is important, but also, getting it done.

Good luck out there.