Why I built an Indie-First QA Company

I didn't come into the world of QA as a traditional corporate tester. From 2015 to 2020, I co-founded and ran an indie games studio. We built original titles across PC, console, and mobile, winning a few awards and managing the usual chaos of indie life along the way. When production spun up on our first major multi-platform console title, we reached a point where we desperately needed an external team to look at the build with fresh eyes.

Naturally, we reached out to a few established QA vendors. But as we started the onboarding process, one thing became glaringly obvious: these companies were built around AAA workflows. Their models were designed for games with multi-million dollar budgets and years of runway. They were completely wrong for indies.

We were surprised at how hard it was to find a dedicated QA partner for small studios. Every vendor we spoke to required a 50-page test plan, lengthy contract negotiations, long locked-in financial engagements, a slow start, and a rotating roster of anonymous testers. This didn't work for our timelines. This didn't work for our financials. This didn't work for our fast-paced development. It didn't even allow us to build any kind of rapport.

Like many indie studios in that position, we looked at the problem and just said

"Forget it, we'll do it ourselves."

We built a lightweight, flexible internal testing framework designed to match our production speed. A few years later, when I took over as the Manager of the Mixed-Reality Capture (MRC) Studio at Durham College, I used that exact same indie-first process to build out research partnerships with local studios. It gave work-integrated learning students an incredibly practical, low-risk way to add immediate value to real commercial games. I worked out the kinks, refined the pipelines, and the team helped launch several games and interactive experiences.

When I eventually moved on from the college to jump back into technical art, the studios we had been helping reached out and asked, "What do we do for external testing now?"

That was the spark. In 2022, I founded Ontario Game Testers to permanently fill that market gap. I built the company to solve the corporate bloat problem for good. We operate on four core values:

• Indie Devs: We never forget our target audience.
• Zero-Friction Onboarding: No lengthy or massive setups; we get started right away.
• Human Intuition: We use our brains for critical thinking and judgment, not scripts or AI.
• Excellence in Communication: Provide clean, clear, and concise data to make things easy for the developer.

We bring the technical rigor of a major studio with the agility of an indie team, ensuring you spend less time managing a vendor and more time making a great game.

If you're an indie developer who needs some QA support, please get in touch with us!