mlga91 :
Beta tester used to be a paid job right?
It still is, especially in the tech/software business world. In the gaming world, there are both full time paid testers and volunteers. The volunteers are looked at as supplemental who may find something or a scenario that wasn't thought of or seen in the core testing group. You can have an in-house team of 50 developer testers and still not be guaranteed of catching every glitch.
I have actually *paid* to be a beta tester (early adopter pre-release Steam game purchase) in both Project Cars and DiRT Rally. Spent over a year with each game playing them and reporting issues before they went gold and were released for retail sale. The way I looked at it was that I got a fully working game at release after the final version update for half the cost of the retail version. Another bonus perk was already having lot of experience and giving online n00bs hints to help them become better and more competitive faster.