It’s your funeral
Be prepared for Square Enix games to fail even EA’s QA standards in the near future 😅
Remember when square used to make great games?
That was Squaresoft, not Square Enix.
I loved Enix’s Ogre Battle and Square’s Final Fantasy 6 and 7. How could putting the companies together make a bad?!
Square Ewwwwnix
My memory failed me. Thanks for the correction.
So their games will cost 70% less right?
Oh. Gross.
Ew, sounds like a great reason to not buy any Square Enix games…
Not even from an ethically standpoint. Color me shocked if these games are like, playable
Exactly, as I don’t expect QA done by something that can’t think or feel to know what actually needs to be fixed. AI is a hallucination engine that just agrees rather than points out issues, in some cases it might call attention to non-issues and let critical bugs slip by. The ethical issues are still significant and play into the reason why I would refuse to buy any more Square Enix games going forward. I don’t trust them to walk this back, they are high on the AI lie. Human made games with humans handling the QA are the only games that I want.
AI is a hallucination engine
Whiplashed by one of the works by great bassist and producer Bill Laswell being inadvertently mentioned in discussion of AI.
Exactly, as I don’t expect QA done by something that can’t think or feel to know what actually needs to be fixed
That is a very small part of QA’s responsibility. Mostly it is about testing and identifying bugs that get triaged by management. The person running the tests is NOT responsible for deciding what can and can’t ship.
And, in that regard… this is actually a REALLY good use of “AI” (not so much generative). Imagine something like the old “A star algorithm plays mario” where it is about finding different paths to accomplish the same goal (e.g. a quest) and immediately having a lot of exactly what steps led to the anomaly for the purposes of building a reproducer.
Which actually DOES feel like a really good use case… at the cost of massive computational costs (so… “AI”).
That said: it also has all of the usual labor implications. But from a purely technical “make the best games” standpoint? Managers overseeing a rack that is running through the games 24/7 for bugs that they can then review and prioritize seems like a REALLY good move.
They’re already not paying for QA, so if anything this would be a net increase in resources allocated just to bring the machines onboard to do the task
Yeah… that is the other aspect where… labor is already getting fucked over massively so it becomes a question of how many jobs are even going away.
I would initially tap the breaks on this, if for no other reason than “AI doing Q&A” reads more like corporate buzzwords than material policy. Big software developers should already have much of their Q&A automated, at least at the base layer. Further automating Q&A is generally a better business practice, as it helps catch more bugs in the Dev/Test cycle sooner.
Then consider that Q&A work by end users is historically a miserable and soul-sucking job. Converting those roles to debuggers and active devs does a lot for both the business and the workforce. When compared to “AI is doing the art” this is night-and-day, the very definition of the “Getting rid of the jobs people hate so they can do the work they love” that AI was supposed to deliver.
Finally, I’m forced to drag out the old “95% of AI implementations fail” statistic. Far more worried that they’re going to implement a model that costs a fortune and delivers mediocre results than that they’ll implement an AI driven round of end-user testing.
Turning Q&A over to the Roomba AI to find corners of the setting that snag the user would be Gud Aktuly.
Converting those roles to debuggers and active devs does a lot for both the business and the workforce.
Hahahahaha… on wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.
They’re just gonna lay them off.
The thing about QA is the work is truly endless.
If they can do their work more efficiently, they don’t get laid off.
It just means a better % of edge cases can get covered, even if you made QAs operate at 100x efficiency, they’d still have edge cases not getting covered.
They’re just gonna lay them off.
And hire other people with the excess budget. Hell, depending on how badly these systems are implemented, you can end up with more staff supporting the testing system than you had doing the testing.
The repetition of “Q&A” reads like this comment was also outsourced to AI.
I was going to say, this is one job that actually makes sense to automate. I don’t know any QA testers personally, but I’ve heard plenty of accounts of them absolutely hating their jobs and getting laid off after the time crunch anyway.
What does Q&A stand for?
Usually Questions and Answers.
Quality and assurance
Ugh. QA. Quality Assurance. Reflexively jamming that & because I am a bad AI.
Regardless, digital simulated users are going to be able to test faster, more exhaustively, and with more detailed diagnostics, than manual end users.
They already have a really cool solution for that, which they talked about in their GDC talk.. I don’t think there’s any need to slap a glorified chatbot into this, it already seems to work well and have just the right amount of human input to be reliable, while also leaving the “testcase replay gruntwork” to a script instead of a human.
A lot of hate in the comments but IMO this is one of the few things that LLMs are actually really good for. It’s a shit job nobody wants to do that LLMs are really good at. Notice that they said 70% and not 100%. Yeah that means they’re probably going to have 30 people doing the work that 100 people used to do but people are still in the picture overseeing things. Automation isn’t, by itself, bad. The bad part is that our whole society is built on the idea that your entire value as a person is based on being able to work and make money and job loss is way worse than it should be.
I’m just shocked any publisher is still doing QA at all, with the state AAA games release in these days.
That’s why they want 70% QA from AI. Because right now their games are only 10% QA tested.
30% of the the QA team will be working at 300% capacity - can you guess which 30%
QA annnnd Debugging?
LLMs have a much better chance at succesfuly replacing whoever said that.
the LLMs can barely make fucking working code, let alone test it
Chrono Trigger remake, first all AI development, because we live in the bad timeline.
spits
Their games going to be shit 🤣
That’s a stupid idea. You’re not supposed to QA or debug games. You just release it, customers report bugs, and then you promise to fix the bugs in the next patch (but don’t).
Or do the Bethesda thing and let people playtest their slop and fix it for free.
No better testing than in production.
it’s a bit late in the game to be making idiotic claims but I guess the default state for corpos is being out of touch
70% by what metric?
Is that going by bugs identified, fixes implemented, headcount?
Realistic goal considering they already do so little QA.
