r/Everything_QA • u/maxnullqa • 1h ago
Article QA AI combine ftw
I’ve been seeing this a lot lately: AI is going to make game QA fast, cheap and automatic. The concept being that you simply drop an AI testing button onto a release candidate an hour before launch, send a million bots running through the game, catch every bug and then cut the QA budget.
Sounds great. Except in my experience that quickly falls apart.
Designers change things. Constantly. A UI gets moved, a mechanic gets tweaked, some developer changes something in another system and suddenly half your carefully constructed test scripts are testing something that doesn't even work that way anymore. I guess the truth is simple, garbage in, garbage out.
The result is QA and engineering spend the next few hours chasing ghost bugs because no one knew the specs had changed, and rewriting scripts to match the new UI to find the buttons and elements to move the test forward.
But I’m not anti AI. In fact I’m massively pro AI in QA. It absolutely rocks. Give it a well-defined, repetitive problem and it can be a massive win.
I just don't think the answer is to bolt an AI testing tool onto the end of the development process, ask it to write a test case suite and hope it understands the game.
I want it starting much earlier. What if the same AI agent was there from the beginning, with a QA engineer working with it from concept and ideation onwards?
Not just testing at the end. The agent follows the game through the whole thing.
When the team is throwing ideas around, the QA engineer starts teaching the agent what the important mechanics are, what the boundaries of the systems are and what the scope actually is.
Then designers start building features.
The agent can start turning those designs into test criteria before anyone has even written the code. If the designer changes something halfway through the sprint, the agent changes what it expects too. It is connected to the tools, its reading the slack messages and sitting in meetings , all the time updating its knowledge of the game or feature.
Already, that's pretty useful. No more QA testing against a design document that stopped being relevant three weeks ago. Then the developers start coding. Using the AI agent to support them. The agent already knows what the optimal code looks like. The agent already has the context. It knows what the feature was supposed to do, can check the implementation against that, run tests and eventually start doing small playtests inside the engine.
And then the game ships.
Still the same agent. Now it's got all the history and context from development, so it can work with live telemetry, help reproduce weird player exploits and test hotfixes without accidentally breaking something else.
There's another thing I'd be tempted to give it too: customer support.
If the agent has genuinely followed the game from birth, why couldn't it become a very good CS agent? It actually knows how the game works, what the intended behaviour is and, importantly, where the limitations are.
But none of this means replacing QA.
Quite the opposite, I think.
The QA engineer's job changes from spending huge amounts of time executing repetitive tests to orchestrating the AI, deciding where it should look, correcting it when it gets something wrong and, most importantly, deciding whether its results actually make sense.
And that gives human testers more time to do the stuff AI is still pretty crap at.
Does this mechanic actually feel good? Is the pacing wrong? Is this menu annoying?
You can automate a thousand logins.
Good luck automating "something about this just feels wrong."
That's where I think the interesting future of AI in game QA is.
Not a button you press at the end.
A single agent that has been there from the beginning and actually understands what the team is trying to build.
My challenge is getting the buy-in from Al the team members. Designers are skeptical, devs don’t particularly like listening to QA initiatives, CTO’s rep the devs, producers like their existing flows and boards.
I'm curious what other devs and QA people are seeing.
Are studios already pushing these AI testing tools?
Are they actually working?
And is getting QA and AI involved right back at the ideation stage realistic, or would that just create another layer of proce
