Electronic Arts has been in the news for all the wrong reasons of late. From the shutdown of studios and teams to the cancellation of projects – and laying off almost hundreds of employees – EA has been bearing the brunt of bad press in recent weeks. Recently, the company’s CEO, Andrew Wilson, took to the stage at a tech conference to speak about the impact that generative AI is having on the games development ecosystem.
He stressed that ‘about 60%’ of all game development processes could be positively impacted by generative AI, and that through artificial intelligence, something that previously took six weeks to achieve could now take just six days.
Meaningful Efficiency
Andrew Wilson professed his love for AI on a grand stage in San Francisco, explaining how Electronic Arts is hopping on that bandwagon like never before:
We’re in the era of generative AI which is the most exciting yet by a fairly wide margin and something that we’re embracing deeply. We think about it in three core vectors: efficiency, expansion, and transformation.
He went on to talk about EA’s game development processes and how there’s a desire to use AI to make the company more efficient by 30%. It’s all about getting games to market faster while not compromising on quality:
And I would tell you, part of that is how do we get our people to embrace it and for creators of games, this is incredibly exciting: the ability to get to the fun faster and get to market faster is the Holy Grail for them. And so, we see a real embrace happening inside of our company around these things that can help them get to greatness much more quickly.
Using the recent release of EA Sports FC as an example, Wilson pointed out that FIFA 23, the last game in the series to feature that branding, boasted 12 ‘run cycles’ for player models – EA Sports FC 24, the most recent game, has 1,200 cycles that were achieved through gen AI.
In an ambitious statement, Wilson pointed out that EA’s network of 700 million people could be increased to over one billion players through the use of AI, boosting monetisation and personalised content. He spoke of a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for Electronic Arts where AI is concerned – because at the end of the day, it’s all about that sweet dollar.
(Thanks to TechRaptor for the quotes)
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