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).
Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027
Submitted 2 days ago by inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
ghost9@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Rhaedas@fedia.io 2 days ago
No better testing than in production.
FatVegan@leminal.space 2 days ago
Or do the Bethesda thing and let people playtest their slop and fix it for free.
sirico@feddit.uk 22 hours ago
It’s your funeral
termaxima@slrpnk.net 22 hours ago
Be prepared for Square Enix games to fail even EA’s QA standards in the near future 😅
boaratio@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Remember when square used to make great games?
Ashiette@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That was Squaresoft, not Square Enix.
nik9000@programming.dev 1 day ago
I loved Enix’s Ogre Battle and Square’s Final Fantasy 6 and 7. How could putting the companies together make a bad?!
BrilliantantTurd4361@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Square Ewwwwnix
boaratio@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
My memory failed me. Thanks for the correction.
Taldan@lemmy.world 2 days ago
So Square Enix is demanding OpenAI stop using their content, but is 100% okay using AI built off stolen content to make more money themselves
As a developer, it bothers me that my code is being used to train AI that Square Enix is using while trying to deny anyone else the ability to use their work
I could go either way on whether or not AI should be able to train on available data, but no one should get to have it both ways
VeryInterestingTable@jlai.lu 2 days ago
QA annnnd Debugging?
LLMs have a much better chance at succesfuly replacing whoever said that.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 1 day ago
the LLMs can barely make fucking working code, let alone test it
kaiyo@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
So their games will cost 70% less right?
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 1 day ago
I’m just shocked any publisher is still doing QA at all, with the state AAA games release in these days.
III@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s why they want 70% QA from AI. Because right now their games are only 10% QA tested.
hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Literally not how any of this works. You don’t let AI check your work, at best you use AI and check it’s work, and at worst you have to do everything by hand anyway.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You don’t let AI check your work
From a game dev perspective, user Q&A is often annoying and repetitive labor. Endlessly criss-crossing terran hitting different buttons to make sure you don’t snag a corner or click objects in a sequence that triggers a state freeze. Hooking a PS controller to Roomba logic and having a digital tool rapidly rerun routes and explore button combos over and over, looking for failed states, is significantly better for you than hoping a massive team of dummy players can recreate the failed state by tripping into it manually.
subignition@fedia.io 2 days ago
There's plenty of room for sophisticated automation without any need to involve AI.
ohshittheyknow@lemmynsfw.com 22 hours ago
That’s not generative AI though. Generative AI is the SLOP machine.
zerofk@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
its *
Ironically, that’s definitely something AI could check for.
hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Spell check? Yeah fair enough. The misspelling has historical value now though so I have to keep it in :P
rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Oh. Gross.
mavu@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Well, good luck with that. Software development is a shit show already anyway. You can find me in my Gardening business in 2027.
Rooster326@programming.dev 2 days ago
Good Luck. When the economy finally bottoms out the first budget to go is always the gardening budget.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Market gardening isn’t so bad, people gotta eat. But yeah, if you’re cutting lawns you’re going to suffer when the economy shits the bed.
mavu@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
That is a valid point, and I think i’ll preemptively pivot to woodworking.
Bakkoda@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Realistic goal considering they already do so little QA.
slaacaa@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Mikina@programming.dev 2 days ago
Square Enix actually has a pretty sick automated QA already. There’s a cool talk about how they did that for FFVII remake in GDC vault, and I highly recommend watching it, if you’re at all interested in QA.
It has nothing to do with AI, it’s just plain old automation, but they solve most of the issues you get with making automated tests in non-discrete 3D playspace and they do that in a pretty solid way. It’s definitely something I’d love to have implemented in the games I’m working on, as someone who worked in QA and now works in development. Being able to have mostly reliable way how to smoke-test levels for basic gameplay without having to torture QA to run the test-case again is good, and allows QA to focus on something else - but the tools also need oversight, so it’s not really a job lost. In summary - I think the talk is cool tech and worth the watch.
However, I don’t think AI will help in this regard, and something as unreliable and random as AI models are not a good fit for this job. You want to have deterministic testcases that you can quanitfy, and if something doesn’t match have an actual human to look at why. AI also probably won’t be able to find clever corner-cases and bugs that need human ingenuity.
Fuck AI, I kind of hope this is just a marketing talk and they are actually just improving the (deterministic) tools they already have, and they are calling it an “AI” to satisfy investors/management without actually slapping a glorified chat-bot into the tech for no reason.
bblkargonaut@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Chrono Trigger remake, first all AI development, because we live in the bad timeline.
webp@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Their games going to be shit 🤣
Grass@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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
MrNesser@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Not buying their next game it will be a nightmare
turdcollector69@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
70% by what metric?
Is that going by bugs identified, fixes implemented, headcount?
other_cat@piefed.zip 1 day ago
Was gonna make a post with this article but this is related so I’ll drop it here instead.
“Square Enix is laying off more developers in the UK and US as it refocuses on Japan
The publisher has expressed interest in replacing development roles with AI”razzazzika@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
So… im a big supporter of squeezing, buy everything they make… but this tells me the quality of their games is going to go down the toilet. Knowing AI it’ll come up with fake lists of bugs that didn’t happen and all the real bugs will not be listed and they’ll release the buggies shit. One thing I LIKE about square, being one of the few companies I do pre-orders from still, is that their products are fairly bug free on launch FFXVI had some graphics optimization issues, but I’ve been happy with most of what I got the past few years.
GladiusB@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
FFXIV saved them and they don’t ever put any money back into the game. It’s their cash cow that pays for all their other bad ideas.
Great graphics and legacy. But some crappy ideas about what the players want.
Look at their payment systems for subs. It’s so confusing for no damn reason.
razzazzika@lemmy.zip 21 hours ago
Believe it or not FFXI was even MORE confusing to sub
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 2 days ago
I hope they put out the last FF VII remake part before that, so i can finally start playing them all! I don’t care what they want to waste their money on afterwards lol
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I wouldn’t be shy about getting into Remake or Rebirth now. They both stand up as their own games (concise start/ending, somewhat distinct mechanics, each one is easily 40+ hours of gameplay). And with Part 3 targeted for 2027 release, I suspect this kind of overhaul would be outside their dev cycle to implement.
MystValkyrie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 hours ago
Moment for silence for David “Ribs” Carillo 🪦
Flickerby@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
And I thought I had no more disappointment left to allocate
pirateKaiser@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
It’s just that you’ve reached your free quota, further disappointments will be charged 0.0937 emotional stability per hour
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 2 days ago
A year from now they’ll be wondering why their games are so buggy.
I_Jedi@lemmy.today 1 day ago
“The players are obviously insane and confused. The AI is always right.”
newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Square Enix exec doesn’t know what QA and Debugging entail.
ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 2 days ago
“Well it works for unit testing, so just extend that out to all testing! Problem solved!” -Senior Management, probably
henfredemars@infosec.pub 2 days ago
Considering how the open source community is being inundated with low-quality bug reports filed using AI, I don’t have much faith in the tech reviewing code, let alone writing it correctly.
Could it be a useful aid? Sure, but 70% of your reviewing is a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream. Not with still delivered a good product.
DeadDigger@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Well their goes FFXIV, that will be their end
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Frankly, this is good news. Whoever buys the rights to kingdom hearts in 3 years when the company falls apart might manage to create an intelligible storyline.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 days ago
But then it won’t be a Kingdom Hearts game!
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Kingdom hearts 1 was a coming of age story with some fantastic elements tossed in
Kingdom hearts 2 was about antipathy and how it destroys the world, with some, uhh, who was that guy? And why’s the bad guy on my side?
Kingdom hearts 3 was, wait, why was he cloned? When was he cloned? When was she, and him, and him again? And his third clone was a girl? And whose heart was imbued into what? What war? What? Who? What???
Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I get that getting all the games as they released was hard, because the series is on so many platforms. But I really don’t get the “KH is hard to understand” argument today, because you can easily find hundreds of letsplays for every game, cutscenes complications, play/watch every game on the PS4 remix disk, and even watch a fandub of the mobile games (Dark Road is a WIP) if you don’t like the KHUX Back Cover recap.
So like, what’s so hard? If you skip games and only read a wiki (the worst possible way to consume any sort of media, mind you), of course you’re not gonna know the story and characters, and of course it’ll sound confusing.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Dude, it’s multi-author-comic level bad. I’ve skipped entire sagas in several book series due to a lack of translations and ended up less confused. It’s green arrow levels of clone shenanigans.
To be clear, I’ve played most of the games and they’re still ridiculously difficult to keep track of. All besides the mobile, early non-Ventus card mechanic arpg, and the disappearing girl clone sora game. They’d be easier to follow if they stuck to the rules of their own universe. Body and heart separate and the body persists not once but twice? Wut?
LostWanderer@fedia.io 2 days ago
Ew, sounds like a great reason to not buy any Square Enix games...
Brutticus@midwest.social 2 days ago
Not even from an ethically standpoint. Color me shocked if these games are like, playable
LostWanderer@fedia.io 2 days ago
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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
natecox@programming.dev 2 days ago
Hahahahaha… on wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.
They’re just gonna lay them off.
NoForwardslashS@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
The repetition of “Q&A” reads like this comment was also outsourced to AI.
binarytobis@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
zerofk@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
What does Q&A stand for?
Mikina@programming.dev 2 days ago
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.