Meet the virtual gamers who test while you sleep: modl.ai unveils QA bots

pcgamesinsider.biz:

While tools like ChatGPT have dominated discourse recently, AI has a ton of behind-the-scenes benefits too. It isn’t all about drafting marketing guff for social media – AI can be a tool for core game development processes like Q&A and testing.

With that in mind, we sat down with Christoffer Holmgård on the show floor at GDC last month to discuss what modl.ai has lined up in this space.

The company delivers AI and machine-learning bots that play, grow and learn inside your game. You can have millions of (artificial) gamers playtest your game at speed. King, N3twork, Nitro and other big companies are already partnered with modl.ai. Holmgård co-founded modl.ai in 2017.

“We’re delivering AI to the games industry now!” says Holmgård, referring to how much speculation there is at GDC about the role of AI. “You have game engines, and you have audio engines, and you have physics engines. We think everybody should have an AI engine as well.”

But this is something other than the wave of text and image generators that has been getting all the press. “We are good, old-fashioned AI,” he jokes. “It’s a behaviour. It’s things that control players inside of games. And what we tell people is: we’re the bot people. We built bots for games for different purposes.”

The service from modl.ai uses bots to automate parts of the QA process. “I don’t think anyone has ever said they had too much testing or QA!” jokes Holmgård. “That’s what we’re trying to enable for studios of all sizes – enabling them to have unlimited virtual players to test out the game. You can also have multiplayer characters and machine-learning-based opponents that you can play against. We want to bring that to the whole industry.”

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