For over ten years, there has been an epidemic of AAA games being released in an unfinished state, with us gamers expected to pay full price and then act as unpaid beta testers. It's a nasty scheme, but it seems to be working, as we see no desire to change the concept.
However, Square Enix has its own idea for how to debug games in the future. On page five of their business plan 'Square Enix Reboots and Awakens' (via VGC), we can read that their goal is to have almost all beta testing done by AI in the near future:
"Automate 70% of QA and debugging tasks in game development by the end of 2027. Through the use of automation technology, aim to improve the efficiency of QA operations and establish a competitive advantage in game development."
This work will be carried out by researchers from the Matsuo-Iwasawa Laboratory in Tokyo, as well as engineers from Square Enix itself.
QA work takes time and is very expensive, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that this will be successful. We all want bug-free and smoother games, but how competent AI is at finding things related to pure gameplay, pedagogically designed menus, and other aspects that are more a matter of opinion and taste remains to be seen.
How do you feel about this?