Copyright nintendolife
Square Enix has laid out plans to automate 70% of QA and debugging tasks with generative AI by 2027. This comes via a progress report on the company's 'Square Enix Reboots and Awakens' business plan (thanks, VGC) in which it hopes to turn its fortunes around and become a true industry leader. It states that it has initiated a partnership with the Matsuo-Iwasawa Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, aimed at "improving the efficiency of game development processes through AI technologies" So as part of this, Square Enix is looking to automate 70% of QA and debugging tasks with generative AI, with hopes to "improve the efficiency of QA operations and establish a competitive advantage in game development". The partnership is currently comprised of "researchers from the Matsuo-Iwasawa Laboratory UTokyo, and engineers from the SQUARE ENIX group", resulting in a team of over ten members. Obviously, this decision will likely be met with mixed reception from fans. On the one hand, QA is said to be a tedious task, but ultimately utilising more and more AI is just going to result in more job losses. And who knows just how accurate AI will prove to be when diagnosing issues? It's a tricky one. Square Enix's announcement comes just after EA launched a new partnership with Stability AI to "co-develop transformative generative AI models, tools, and workflows that empower EA’s artists, designers, and developers to reimagine how games are made". EA had presumably predicted the negative response to this announcement, and stressed that human creators will still be the driving force at the company, stating that AI "can draft, generate, and analyze, but it can’t imagine, empathize, or dream". What do you make of this move from Square Enix? Let us know your thoughts with a comment down below.
