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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)
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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Be prepared for Square Enix games to fail even EA's QA standards in the near future π
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.
So their games will cost 70% less right?
Oh. Gross.
70% by what metric?
Is that going by bugs identified, fixes implemented, headcount?
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... im a big supporter of squeenix, 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.
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.
Believe it or not FFXI was even MORE confusing to sub
Moment for silence for David "Ribs" Carillo πͺ¦
Chrono Trigger remake, first all AI development, because we live in the bad timeline.
spits
Their games going to be shit π€£
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 will continue ignoring anything they make
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.
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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.
Hahahahahaβ¦ on wait youβre serious. Let me laugh even harder.
Theyβre just gonna lay them off.
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Well their goes FFXIV, that will be their end
Realistic goal considering they already do so little QA.
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
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
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.
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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
πββοΈπββοΈπββοΈπββοΈ I came to this 𧡠to make this exact ridicule.
Capitalists really showing their true colors when it comes to self-indulgence.
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.
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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 donβt 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.
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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.
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
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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So.. no more SE games for me. Not a huge loss to be honest.
Lol. Good luck!
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