Generative AI would help studios make games faster, says EA CEO – “there is a real hunger amongst our developers to get to this as quickly as possible”

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Electronic Arts (EA) CEO Andrew Wilson has said the use of advanced generative AI would make game development “more efficient” so the company can make games “on a global basis at a faster rate”.

Speaking during EA’s financial results investor call on May 7 (via VGC) when asked during a Q&A session if EA has plans to introduce AI in game development, Wilson confirmed that the company has already began doing so.

Wilson used the EA Sports FC series as an example and explained that AI allows the development team to making football stadium quicker and create a variety of animations.

“As a company, we’ve been deeply tied to AI since our inception,” Wilson said. “It has been the very center of all of the games that we create, replicating human intelligence in the context of a game play experience. But certainly, as we think about the wave of generative AI today and as it merges into artificial general intelligence, broadly, we’re still very early.

“But the things I talked about in the conference were really both two-fold. One, how do we get more efficient? The stat I used was we’ve moved from being able to create stadiums from 6 months to 6 weeks. And my expectation is that will continue to shrink over time.”

The EA boss explained that when it builds games it has animation and run cycles and that in FIFA 23, the team had 36 run cycles “which gave you a kind of believability of human performance inside of that game” but with EA Sports FC 24, it had 1,200 run cycles.

Wilson said this “adds to the individuality and uniqueness of each player” while also delivering better immersion, adding that EA is looking at how AI can “make us more efficient, how can it give our developers more power, how can it give them back more time and allow them to get to the fun more quickly.”

The discussion continued, with Wilson further explaining how EA’s game development process could be enhanced by generative AI in the future, saying that based on early assessments, “we believe that more than 50% of our development processes will be positively impacted” by AI.

“If efficiency starts to really take place over the next 1-3 years, our expectation is that, over a 3- to 5-year time horizon, we will be able to, as part of our massive online communities and blockbuster storytelling, build bigger, more immersive worlds that engage more players uniquely around the world,” Wilson said. “And we think about that on a 3- to 5-year time horizon.

The CEO then talked more about the future timeline, but ended by saying that he believes there is “a real hunger amongst our developers to get to this as quickly as possible” so they can “build bigger, more innovative, more creative, more fun games more quickly so that we can entertain more people around the world on a global basis at a faster rate.”