The launch of EA Sports College Football 25 has been nothing short of a success. The game has far surpassed internal expectations and sales numbers, and is expected to be one of the most successful sports games of the year. But according to EA CEO Andrew Wilson, none of this would be possible if AI wasn’t used during the development of College Football 25.
During the company’s recent earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, Wilson was asked about AI being used in development. He says that in order to achieve what the team did with player likeness, stadiums, and more, it was necessary in order to get the game to release when it did.
How College Football 25 Used AI
“[T]he reality is, is we had an incredible team working on this, but we had to get 11,000 new star player heads into the game,” Wilson said. “For those that don’t track our industry or track our sports games in particular, we typically in any given year will develop about 500 to 1000 star heads inside of one of our games.
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He continued: “And over the course of a platform generation, through the hand tooling of that, we ultimately fill out the full roster of star heads in our games. And of course there are ebbs and flows in that. But as we were launching College on a new generation of platforms, to a new generation of fans with the world’s largest single sport NIL deal, where image was a really important part of the process, getting 11,000 star heads into the game was a top priority for us.
“The reality is our teams are incredible and built workflows to facilitate that, but they were amplified and accelerated through AI and machine learning. And we were able to take in a whole plethora of photo imagery across 11,000 players and build workflows out where AI and machine learning would generate heads. And our very talented artists would be able to come in and touch up and enhance those heads, versus having to go through the full head development program.
“In the absence of AI, we simply would not have been able to deliver College football at the level we did, even though we’d given the team many, many years in development.”
As AI technology becomes more and more prevalent, it’s not surprising that it would be used in the creation of a major title like College Football 25. The question, however, is where will it go from here with future development?
What do you make of AI being used in the development of College Football 25? For more Insider Gaming, read about what Xbox is bringing to Gamescom this year.
