I think the #1 reason why games don't need a lot of automated testing is serialization, or rather the common lack of it in most game worlds. If the data gets corrupt, you can reset the game and all is well again. When the rare corner cases pop up, it's easy to play whack-a-mole with them, because they're all "shallow" in the sense of the game starting from a clean reset frequently, so you can usually reproduce the bug quickly.
Of course, if the game does need heavy-duty serialization of everything, all bugs are potentially deadly. And this is largely the case for the line-of-business, social, and productivity apps, because that data is considered mission-critical. Corruption is not OK, reverting to backups is to be avoided. When a game has that kind of requirement, things get a lot tougher - and so games have naturally evolved to favor minimizing the save data to nothing or a few stats.
And this is borne out by looking for contrapositives. There are two genres that have a history of tending to be buggy because of some form of long-term data corruption: Large-scope RPGs and turn-based strategy games. It's hard to reach the bugs in those games, so it's also hard to fix them.
This is the difficulty for the company I work for. We make a range of desktop applications including launchers, productivity apps, media apps, games, etc.
Because all of these apps are based on a game engine, we get the complex and hard to test bugs that games get (texture cache corruption, null pointers in the scene tree, etc.). There's much more serialization and pressure than with pure games (but still not as much as with enterprise applications) because we're dealing with transactions with 3rd party services, or because a screw up could corrupt a user's whole music collection, or because users don't expect their music player to crash every 4 hours.
The game engine adds a huge amount of extra variability to our applications; we have to not only watch out for obscure bugs in our custom script code (which the engine silently tries/fails to execute anyway), but also in the (C/C++ based) game engine it is driving. The upside to using an engine with a simple scripting language is the shorter development times to get things off the ground and the high-performance/shiny visuals, but I feel it costs us much more down the line in terms of stability and extensibility.
I'm not sure I would be allowed/qualified to say much about our financials. From what I can gather we are profitable, with ongoing contracts for clients such as Dell.
At the risk of going too far off topic and without intending to be too harsh: at least in the video, that interface looks nice, but there is too much lag between when a tap/gesture is made and when the interface reflects it. This breaks the direct manipulation metaphor and is, I think, a showstopper. The pinch to zoom example was particularly off-putting: how can I know how much I'm zooming when the interface doesn't track my gesture? I cannot imagine being happy with pinching, waiting a second to see what's happened, then pinching and waiting to adjust (repeat until I get it right or am too frustrated).
I don't think there's too much danger in going off-topic if the conversation is interesting and has some substance.
Yea I think lag in touchscreen interaction is a huge problem. I think this is largely a result of hardware. We've had to ship on atom-based hardware with 2003-era DX9 graphics. Even the latest Intel chips with DX10 are horridly slow when it comes to graphics.
The other side is actual touchscreen hardware. The machine used in the video is an HP Touchsmart, which uses an optical touchscreen panel. These panels have a latency of around 100-200ms, and that's before we even start processing the touch event information. Capacitive touch sensors are much better, but the're expensive to manufacture above about 10 inches.
In the end lag/accuracy is a reality of the low-cost hardware OEMs use, and there will always be some trade-off between hardware cost and performance.
Of course, if the game does need heavy-duty serialization of everything, all bugs are potentially deadly. And this is largely the case for the line-of-business, social, and productivity apps, because that data is considered mission-critical. Corruption is not OK, reverting to backups is to be avoided. When a game has that kind of requirement, things get a lot tougher - and so games have naturally evolved to favor minimizing the save data to nothing or a few stats.
And this is borne out by looking for contrapositives. There are two genres that have a history of tending to be buggy because of some form of long-term data corruption: Large-scope RPGs and turn-based strategy games. It's hard to reach the bugs in those games, so it's also hard to fix them.