With the release of its latest quarterly financial results, Square Enix published a progress report on its “Square Enix Reboots and Awakens” medium-term business plan. Initiated last year, the three-year plan aims to overhaul the company’s game development and publishing strategy.
In the progress report, Square Enix announced that, as part of its efforts to “create additional foundational stability,” the company has formed a joint research team with the Matsuo Laboratory at the University of Tokyo “aimed at improving the efficiency of game development processes through AI technologies.”
According to the report, Square Enix’s goal for the joint research team, which incorporates both UTokyo researchers and Square Enix engineers, is to “automate 70% of QA and debugging tasks in game development by the end of 2027” by using generative AI to “improve the efficiency of QA operations.”
Automation tools are already a fixture of quality assurance in game development; major game engines like Unreal even offer built-in testing automation tools. But seeking to develop new tools to perform the majority of QA labor, in roughly two years, using technologies like those already making game developers miserable at other major publishers like EA, is an ambitious goal.
And while Square Enix doesn’t say as much, it’s hard to read that goal as anything other than a quiet statement of the company’s intent to replace its existing QA workforce.
Square Enix’s recent history demonstrates that when it invokes the spirit of “efficiency,” layoffs tend to follow. As an example, the company’s joint AI research is just one piece of its business plan’s effort to “create additional foundational stability.” The other half of that pillar is a “fundamental” restructuring of its overseas publishing organization, which already led to layoffs across its US and EU offices in 2024 following the business plan’s initiation—and has just produced even more.
As of today, after the publishing of the latest progress report, Square Enix laid off additional overseas staff at its US and UK offices according to Bloomberg reporting. A spokesperson for Square Enix told Bloomberg that the layoffs were made “in order to best position the group’s long-term growth.”
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