Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty has said it's his "dream" to turn to "transformational" AI and machine learning as an alternative to human QA testing. Booty dove into his desire for AI testers during his "Storytime With Matt Booty" panel during PAX West. He said QA testing has "not really kept up with how quickly we can make content," as reported by VGC (opens in new tab), and went on to compare changing something minor in a game as opposed to a movie. "If we're working on a movie and you come in and say'hey, this ending let's tighten this up, let's edit this, let's cut that scene,' it usually doesn't break anything at the beginning of the movie," he said. "But in a game you can be ready to ship and a designer's like'I've got this one little feature, I'm just going to change the colour on this one thing' and then it somehow blows up something and now the first 10 minutes of the game doesn't play. So that testing aspect, every single time anything new goes into a big game the whole game has to be tested, front-to-back, side-to-side."

Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty told a live audience at PAX that he'd like to see QA (Quality Assurance) testers replaced by AI. Gaming QA testers regularly come under fire as bug-riddled games reach the hands of disappointed gamers with seemingly increasing prevalence. The backlash QA testers receive from frustrated gamers is often misplaced. Managers are often aware that games are full of bugs but decide to release unfinished games anyway in the hope of starting to recoup development costs. However, proper QA testing is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. On the PAX stage, Booty explained how a game needs to be re-tested from start to finish whenever a feature is added.

When Microsoft bought Mojang, the makers of the insanely popular Minecraft, in a surprise 2.5 billion deal in September 2014, nobody knew what to think. The game seemed an odd fit for Microsoft, whose biggest moneymakers are its productivity software and Windows PC operating system. Minecraft's millions of players fretted that the game was destined to be ruined under its new corporate parent, or that Microsoft would restrict the game to its own Xbox and Windows platforms. Two years later, Minecraft is more popular and widely available than ever. Since the beginning of this year, Mojang says, people have bought 53,000 copies of Minecraft every single day.