Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027
The publisher is researching “Game QA Automation Technology” with the University of Tokyo
Square Enix says it wants the majority of its QA and debugging work to be handled by generative AI within the next two years.
Following the release of its latest financial results, the publisher posted a progress report on its medium-term business plan, which was originally announced last year under the name Square Enix Reboots and Awakens.
As part of this plan, Square Enix says it has launched a partnership with the Matsuo-Iwasawa Laboratory at the University of Tokyo which is “aimed at improving the efficiency of game development processes through AI technologies”.
The project, which is titled Joint Development of Game QA Automation Technology Using Generative AI, is being tackled by “a joint research team of more than ten members”, including researchers from the University of Tokyo and engineers from the Square Enix group.
The goal, according to the report, is to “automate 70% of QA and debugging tasks in game development by the end of 2027”.
It says that by using automation technology, Square Enix will “aim to improve the efficiency of QA operations and establish a competitive advantage in game development”.
The topic of AI being used for QA roles has been debated for some time now. While those in favour of it argue that QA testing can be a repetitive and boring job, others argue that humans are better at spotting and describing anomalies while testing a game.
The other argument often made is that replacing humans with AI could result in the loss of numerous job opportunities. Some see QA roles as a potential gateway into higher paid, more creative roles in a company over time.
Last month it was reported that Electronic Arts staff are finding it a challenge to carry out management’s demands that they use AI tools for “just about everything”, including QA.
One former Respawn employee who worked in a senior QA role told Business Insider that he believes one of the reasons he was among 100 colleagues laid off this past spring is because AI was reviewing and summarising feedback from play testers, a job he usually did.
The replacing of staff with AI for QA purposes is something that has been actively pursued by some publishers and developers for a number of years. Back in 2022, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty said it was his dream to one day have an army of artificial intelligence QA testers.
“My dream – there’s a lot going on with AI and machine learning right now, and people using AI to generate all these images,” he said at the time. “What I always say when I bump into the AI folks, is: ‘Help me figure out how to use an AI bot to go test a game.’
“Because I would love to be able to start up 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud, so there’s 10,000 copies of the game running, deploy an AI bot to spend all night testing that game, then in the morning we get a report. Because that would be transformational.”
