Modl.ai, the AI-driven company that does QA for video games to detect bugs, performance issues, and more, has just published a new study regarding gaming QA. The study, which involved almost 300 professional developers from the US, revealed that a staggering 77% of developers don’t do sufficient QA for their titles.

Why it matters: Despite such big budgets, video games have been released in an underwhelming state full of bugs. This new study shows why, revealing a lack of QA testing for those hundreds of millions of dollars of games. Star Wars Outlaws Was Full Of Game Breaking Bugs At Launch
This wasn’t the only statistic revealed from the study. 70.3% of the participants revealed that they had never launched a bug-free game. However, the reason why this is so is more interesting.

50% of the responders claim that the QA budgets aren’t increasing on par with the complexities of modern-day development, which are on an increased scale and cost more manpower and budgets.

This is the reason why modern titles launch in such a buggy state despite hundreds of millions of dollars allocated in their budget. Star Wars Outlaws cost around $200-300 million but was still launched in such a subpar state full of bugs. Similarly, the likes of Starfield had plenty of bugs at releases. It Took Years For CDPR To Fix All The Bugs In Cyberpunk 2077 Before It Was In A Playable State
The whole situation is partly to be blamed on the actual development process, which has become so complex over the years. For example, the notorious Unreal Engine 5 has been known to ruin video game development.

Fixing all these problems late into development costs so much manpower and budget that it just isn’t sustainable before the release.

To combat this, AI-driven QA is taking over. 94% of the 300 developers believe AI is the future of shaping QA for video games and catching bugs and performance issues. However, currently, only 18% of the participants are ready to integrate AI across their development.