What do you call them

[J0SH]

Game testers or beta testers.

For future reference: Google search engine still exists.

Post count is important though.

And what they said, games tester, beta tester etc

[PaulMacC]

I play games, upload them to youtube and make quite a nice amount tbf.

[geo]

I thought there was a job for people? My friend wanted to do this as he's amazing at games and loves them, aha.

[Jonster]

Dreamers. There's no such thing, it's just a job which children think exist.

The developers are generally the ones to test them, there's market researchers who find out what people want and think, then of course there's beta testers which are just the general public or friend's of developers (They're certainly not doing it for a job) and then there's critics who just review them for journalistic value.

Major firms have QA divisions which test the game to its full once it's in a "ready" state. The developers will never test the final product (unless it's a really small firm making a relatively small game). Usual entry level job for this is QA tester and is typically of interest to those that want to breakthrough into the industry. Salary wise I have no idea, but I'd put a guess on minimum wage with long hours.

Failing that, firms may pay online (and almost definitely offline) external testing companies such as Combat Testing to fully test the game (eg. server load tests, major bugs etc) and feed information back. Going down this route is voluntary work whereby after 2 - 3 years you may find yourself in a paid position, though the amount of work required to get to this stage is astronomical.