I’ve heard of many people (through reading different articles online) that are “professional” game testers and actually make money doing it. I love video gaming as I’m sure a lot do but I want a job like this. Does anyone know anybody that does this for a living? I really want to join in on the fun lol
Being a game tester sounds like a dream job but it’s actually one of the most boring, thankless and soul crushing jobs you can get.
Imagine having to test a single feature of a game over and over again for hours and filling bug reports only to have most if not all of them ignored by the dev team or publisher because there is no time, money or some other reason to fix those bugs.
Imagine having to play through shitty handheld games all day and possibly hurting your hands in the process.
It’s a rarely fun job and is often unfulfilling due to the way the industry works.
Yeah, your description sort of sounds like you heard of people that play games for money somewhere and you want to get in on the action, but it’s more complicated than that. There’s a reason it’s paid work when if it was that simple any random guy would volunteer for free. If you love playing video games, this job will kill it for you.
There’s a world of a difference between playing around in an early, unfinished version of a game, and being a game tester, Q/A or what have you. It comes down to more than just finding glitches/bugs, throwing stuff at walls, jumping on everything until something breaks or telling them whether something is fun or not. They’re gonna want detailed, ideally insightful reports on everything from more than just a simple player’s perspective. No one likes writing essays. These are developers looking to make their game better and they’re spending their hard-earned cash on you to help, not just play around for a few hours and say whether you liked it or not.
That said, though, I only go into that detail because it sorta sounds like your idea is skewed towards fantasy. Not really sure what you want from us, though. It is a job, Q/A and the rest. Not really some secret club or anything where you need a buddy that’s “in” to get you a job. 
If you’re dead serious, a search engine and some research never hurt any one. Still wouldn’t recommend it, though.
It’s basically a desk job where you happen to play videogames.
Still better than my job.
I’d recommend you read up on people’s actual experiences testing games with Tales from the Trenches. Not all experiences will be this bad, of course, but it is something to keep in mind - a lot of the time, QA personnel aren’t treated well, and testing the same part of a game, especially a bad one, gets really old really quickly.
That said, if you really want to do it, do a search for publishers or development studios on your area - there’s practically always a demand for testers, especially since most places tend to go through them like a hot knife through butter. Hopefully you’ll get one of the good places!
Why in the world would you want this job? Your job isn’t to play videogames. Your job is to break videogames. This means spending hours in each area, pressing every key combination, taking every possible combination of player actions, using every possible combination of settings, until you find one that breaks something, at which point you write up a bug report, then do it again… then recreate the exact set of circumstances that broke it again later to make sure that it’s actually fixed. I make mods, and testing them is my least favorite part of the process.
Here’s a typical week for playtesters.
Let’s say you’re playtesting Black Mesa. You are assigned a certain area to check, let’s say the Anomalous Materials chapter. You are now stuck in Anomalous Materials, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week (or more). You cannot progress the story line. You cannot start the Resonance Cascade. You are stuck in that section of the game for quite a long time. You need to make sure that there are no problems with anything in that area.
You aren’t playing video games. You are working.
Another fine example why work sucks 
If you want to play games for a living you’re better off learning how to edit and making gaming videos on a video sharing site that allows for ad and user revenue.
Yup, if you want to play games all day and get money for it, this is not a job for you.
If you’re ready to write detailed reports, break the game in all sorts of creative ways and do arduous tasks over and over again, then by all means, apply for the job. Plus, unless you like every single genre, you’ll most likely get to test a game that you wouldn’t even enjoy playing, not to mention testing.
“Hey, you know this app that allows you to read eBooks on your game console? You’re going to be testing that with this test ‘story’ for the next three weeks. Good luck!”