LogInThe head of Xbox Game Studios believes that using AI bots instead of QA specialists will make game testing faster and easier.
During a Q&A section at the recent PAX West event, the head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty spoke about implementing artificial intelligence into game testing saying that his dream is to one day see the deployment of AI bots which could replace QA testers.
According to Booty, testing is currently one of the processes that "have not really kept up with how quickly [developers] can make content." He explained that unlike film production, where last-minute changes do not significantly impact the final product, in game development, there is a possibility that some changes, even small ones like adding a little feature, can influence the proper work of the entire game.
"If we’re working on a movie and you come in and say 'hey, this ending, let’s tighten this up, let’s edit this, let’s cut that scene', it usually doesn’t break anything at the beginning of the movie," he said. "But in a game you can be ready to ship, and a designer’s like, 'I’ve got this one little feature, I’m just going to change the colour on this one thing' and then it somehow blows up something and now the first 10 minutes of the game doesn’t play."
That is why, according to Booty, every time whenever a new feature is added, the whole game has to be tested, "front-to-back, side-to-side."
So, Booty's idea is to use AI bots that could do game testing instead of QA specialists to make this process faster and easier.
"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," Booty said. "Because that would be transformational."
"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. "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.'"
Booty's idea to see QA work performed by AI seems pretty controversial as QA workers are already one of the most maligned groups in the games industry. Judging by recent data, the quality assurance worker is the lowest-paid role in the industry. In addition, it is QA testers who often report mistreatment by their employers.
All this leads to numerous campaigns to unionize QA workers to bring better job security. For instance, in May, quality assurance workers at Raven Software, Activision Blizzard's subsidiary responsible for Call of Duty: Warzone, successfully voted to form a union. They first announced the formation of the union in January following December protests when 60 Raven employees resigned after the studio’s decision to lay off 12 of their co-workers.
You can watch Matt Booty's Q&A at PAX West 2022 here. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.