Game development: Xbox game boss wants automated QA tests via AI

The fact that games are released without numerous bugs or other defects is rather the exception these days. The reasons for this vary. The main reason is the lack of time until the planned release and the increasing complexity of the projects at the same time.

In the games industry, manual testing is still the standard procedure for tracking down quality assurance bugs. The fact that many errors sometimes go undetected, since numerous marginal cases cannot be taken into account at all and therefore only come to light as soon as the broad masses get their hands on the game, is a big disadvantage. One solution to the problem would be larger QA departments. In terms of cost, however, they make little sense. The only thing left is automation, which AI could help with.

At least that’s how the head of Xbox Game Studios, Matt Booty, imagines it, who spoke about the problem in a Q&A session at the PAX West 2022 games fair. According to him, current QA processes simply cannot keep up with the speed at which content is created. To explain his point, Booty draws a comparison with the film industry and contrasts its static content with the dynamic content of games.

“When we’re working on a movie, you can come in and say, ‘Hey, let’s make the ending a little tighter. Let’s change that. Let’s cut a scene out of here.’ It doesn’t usually destroy the beginning of the movie, but with games you can be done and then a designer comes along and says, ‘I have this one little feature. I’m going to change the color on this one thing’ and then for some reason it works burst into flames and now the first 10 minutes of the game are unplayable.”

In the end, it always boils down to testing a game from start to finish with every new feature. His dream would be to have this work done by automated AI, which is largely due to the many advances in this field over the past few years. Microsoft would have the resources to do that, so Booty notes that he’s always asking AI developers to help him come up with a solution for an AI bot to test games.

“I would like to just be able to launch 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud. So run 10,000 copies of the game, I send out an AI bot and it spends all night testing the game and the morning after that I’ll get a report. That would be transformative,” Booty continued.

Source: via PCGamer.com