Free-to-play on iOS and Android, with time-travel levels spanning Ancient Egypt, the Pirate Seas and the Wild West — Plants vs. Zombies 2 was a certification challenge mostly because of scale. Multiple storefronts, multiple territories, a freemium model with Plant Food power-ups and in-app purchases woven throughout. Making sure all of it complied with every regional content and commerce requirement was more involved than the cheerful sunflowers would suggest.
Back in the day, before studios started shipping bugs as features, I worked through the full certification process on the other side of the screen — testing games for Electronic Arts. Certification & compliance, which sounds dry but basically means being the last line of defense before a game hits the shelves: making sure it doesn’t crash, doesn’t cheat the rating system, and does exactly what it says on the box in every region it’s going to land in.
It wasn’t glamorous work, but it gave me something most designers never get: a really intimate understanding of how games break, and why. Every bug report I filed was a small lesson in the gap between intention and execution — which, turns out, is pretty much what design is about too.
