Around 2.5 billion people play games worldwide, and many of them buy games, subscriptions, and downloadable content.
But gamers are frequently picky and indeed wise consumers. If they get extraordinarily impatient or frustrated with gaming, they can be fast to move on to the next game, or worse yet, they might find nothing else to do.
The developers, therefore, work hard to know and disseminate as per the needs of consumers. Especially, when the revenue lost when players leave is significant.
In a sector now experiencing tremendous growth, game testing aims to stop this kind of financial loss. To put the size of the gaming industry into perspective, video game sales increased by 20% in 2020, and by 2025, it is anticipated that the global market would be worth about $250 billion. Therefore, gaming organizations are paying close attention to software quality, testing, and automation because there is so much money at risk. Also, not to forget that one of the most well-liked uses of AI over the years has been in the world of gaming.
However, one of the most interesting and potentially advantageous applications of AI can be game testing. In this blog, we will aim to understand the concept of AI in game testing while learning various benefits of using AI for game testing purposes.
How Does AI Enhance The Game Testing?
By identifying the best testing sets, artificial intelligence can maximize risk coverage error and detection while decreasing execution time, costs, and the number of test cases. By identifying new test cases, sporadic test cases, untested requirements, and other test cases unrelated to the needs, it can identify weak points in test case groups.
Artificial intelligence also possesses self-healing automation qualities, allowing it to fix damaged automated test cases and improve automated testing’s adaptability to changes. Despite the advantages mentioned above, artificial intelligence can detect any little detail that might be altered in a game product’s design.
On that note, let us quickly jump on learning ways how AI could complement the testing process for any games:
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AI can identify errors or bugs before they become costly
As software development progresses, bugs and errors become very expensive to mitigate or correct. However, AI offers a quick reaction, helping to identify flaws as early as feasible in the process and resulting in significant cost savings. Developers of video game products create an artificial intelligence tool that may warn programmers of potential faults or defects as they type in code.
It can quickly identify patterns that indicate an issue is being produced and notify the software developer, allowing them to take the appropriate action. Since bug fixes can consume up to 70% of a game app’s development budget, artificial intelligence has the potential to be very profitable for their industry.
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Artificial intelligence can assist in resolving issues with automated testing
Automated testing is widely recognized as an essential tool for achieving contemporary Quality Assurance and testing goals; it may quickly get around bottlenecks and unleash the power of automated testing for DevOps environments. Ninety-nine percent of software companies employ DevOps for some aspect of their operations. Automated testing is crucial to the climate of DevOps and their pipelines for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.
The following are the top benefits of AI and automated testing:
- Most effective test case can be reused
- Reduced testing costs
- Improved test coverage
- Added test activity
- Transparency and control
- Improved fault or defect detection
- Shorter test cycle times
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Artificial Testing understands the data to be used for game testing
90% of the data flow within the game is made up of template data, which can be effectively categorized and structured. Numerous apps depend on the same data, including email addresses, field names, search queries for a specific profile, phone numbers, issues with in-app purchases, media data, and more. However, a small set of input data will be adequate to establish a network of successful tests based on the successes of artificial intelligence testing. All of this is sufficient for anyone to have a dependable assistant during the software testing and development phases, at the very least.
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AI for game store testing and asset verification
Modern video games are quite visual, and test automation can now validate these kinds of graphically demanding applications because of AI. Visual gaming materials usually include various lighting and creative effects in addition to being animated, constantly shifting in position and orientation on the screen. Under these circumstances, computer vision-based methods effectively locate and classify objects.
The animated item may be trained using photos taken from a stream or recording. Like people, robots can identify objects from any angle and under different lighting and special effects. It is impossible to locate dynamically rendered objects in a video game using conventional automation techniques. Computer vision makes this possible.
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Other minute aspects
Real issues are being found and categorized by AI on servers and data centers hosting production game streaming. These include blank screens, broken stream connections, unsuccessful stream launches, and more. The bots improve at seeing and spotting connections between problems as they execute more of these tests over time. Due to the enormous amount of data created by each test run, connecting these disparate bits of information would be nearly difficult for humans to do without Artificial intelligence.
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Gameplay testing
AI has made great strides when it comes to gaming. Years ago, the bots first learned to play simple games like tic-tac-toe via brute force computing. However, today’s bots use machine learning and self-play rather than brute force to master more difficult, intuitive games like Go, Atari Games, Mario Brothers, and others. And thus, this has been all possible with the help of AI.
Wrapping up
AI-based solutions can detect errors by resolving countless test cases. Besides, implementing AI to test the games might be the best course of action for game testers to determine whether a game feature matches the intended strategy or not. However, it is the careful and effective implementation of AI technology that can help you meet your goals.
Suggested Read: Software development vs Testing