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Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
Oh. Gross.
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Well their goes FFXIV, that will be their end
Chrono Trigger remake, first all AI development, because we live in the bad timeline.
spits
Their games going to be shit 🤣
Remember when square used to make great games?
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
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%
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"
Not buying their next game it will be a nightmare
Realistic goal considering they already do so little QA.
A year from now they'll be wondering why their games are so buggy.
"The players are obviously insane and confused. The AI is always right."
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
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.
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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.
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The repetition of "Q&A" reads like this comment was also outsourced to AI.
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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
Well, good luck with that. Software development is a shit show already anyway. You can find me in my Gardening business in 2027.
Good Luck. When the economy finally bottoms out the first budget to go is always the gardening budget.
You can find me in my plumbing business in 2028.
I deal with shit daily so it's what we in biz call a horizontal promotion.
That is a valid point, and I think i'll preemptively pivot to woodworking.
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.
And I thought I had no more disappointment left to allocate
It's just that you've reached your free quota, further disappointments will be charged 0.0937 emotional stability per hour
Lol. Good luck!
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.
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 (which actually are AI by definition, since they also do level exploration on top of recorded inputs), and they are calling it an "AI" to satisfy investors/management without actually slapping a glorified chat-bot into the tech for no reason.
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.
You don’t let AI check your work
From a game dev perspective, user ~~Q&A~~ QA 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 an overworked team of dummy players can recreate the failed state by tripping into it manually.
There's plenty of room for sophisticated automation without any need to involve AI.
I mean, as a branding exercise, every form of sophisticated automation is getting the "AI" label.
Past that, advanced pathing algorithms are what Q&A systems need to validate all possible actions within a space. That's the bread-and-butter of AI. Its also generally how you'd describe simulated end-users on a test system.
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So.. no more SE games for me. Not a huge loss to be honest.
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
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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. AI just isn't ready for this level of responsibility in any organization.
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.
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They jumped on the NFT bandwagon a couple years ago, too. Did they not learn anything from that?
Sure
insert plane crashing.gif
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