[otikik]

I think the reason is that tests have a very obvious up-front cost, while the time they save is distributed in the future, in a non-immediately obvious way. I still think that they end up saving time, with some exceptions like UI code, which are more easily tested "by hand".

Game project managers are infamous for not being great planners, so it wouldn't surprise me that they dismissed automated tests as "a waste of time" or "something that we can't do now because we don't have time now" (so we end up wasting more time in the end, having to do death marches, etc)

[midnightclubbed]

In defense of game project managers (a phrase I may have never said before) is that their planning is often fine, but hampered by changes to game design/direction/requirements. Unless you're churning out a copy-cat derivative game design requirements have to be reasonably loose as you find what does and doesn't 'work'. Finding the fun is not easily managed.

[blktiger]

Modern games have only increased the benefits a game studio can gain from testing as well. Games are now moving into service territory which only increases the amount of time spent maintaining the game while continuing to add to it.

[midnightclubbed]

This. Determining when the effort should be applied is the tricky part. Games are still hit driven and get cancelled/re-purposed during development. You can spend a lot of QA engineering time developing systems to test functionality that never ships (case in point would be Fortnight - the original shipped game did not need to be tested against the current 100 player game instances and huge load but they could have spent a bunch of time testing AI systems that are no longer any part of the game).

[blktiger]

I don't disagree that it's important to understand when something is purely a proof of concept vs something that will stick around to evaluate the costs. However, the AI systems are still in Fortnite (and they even used those systems for the Haloween event). The major money making part of Fortnite has been the battle royale mode though. If they open up the main game to be free-to-play similar to the battle royale mode those systems will probably end up being used quite a bit.

[justinhj]

Or perhaps game projects are extremely difficult to manage? You think if it was just a matter of competence then these companies would put billion dollar revenue on the line not hiring the best they can find?