I don’t think your idea would work. Most QA testers can’t become software developers. It’s not the same job. Some can but most can’t - they would already be software developers if they could as the pay is nicer. You would need significant training for it to work and even then it would prevent you for hiring more experienced talents as needed from the software developers pool.
I’m not sure this is true - I moved from test to dev and then back to test. I definitely earn more money than I did as a dev and honestly from an engineering perspective I find it’s more interesting. While a developer might focus on web or desktop or embedded or games, I’m a developer that focuses on testing. Maybe you’re right for a subset of manual testers but I like to think there are very capable developers working in the QA realm.
That's true in the software industry in general but games industry QA is very much different from that. The bulk of games industry QA is largely untrained, non-technical personnel manually executing test cases written by others and therefore wages are low and they are treated as completely fungible. (I'm not defending it, just describing it.) The article mentions hundreds of testers, so it's far more likely they're that type of tester rather than SDETs.
