Just because something is "begging for automation" means automating it is easy or even just viable. You'll always need human QA, so at this point the question i

Just because something is "begging for automation" means automating it is easy or even just viable. You'll always need human QA, so at this point the question is merely "how can tests reduce the load for manual QA while keeping manual QA good at the parts we can't automate". Game testing is a lot like UI testing in other apps that way. And then in reverse, are the automatic tests worth the maintenance effort if a human is going to try anyways and notice quickly? IMHO that's the part where many people underestimate them, but getting the balance right is still hard. EDIT: of course its biased, but its interesting to think through bugs you encounter in games and how you'd catch them with tests. I feel often its more on the level of fuzzing than traditional tests that could catch these things, or it is visual issues that are very hard to automatically find.