EA Sports College Soccer 25 it's not just a great success For EA, it also marked the publisher’s first public use of generative AI. And according to Andrew Wilson, the technology was the only way for EA Orlando to reach the full scope of the game.
Over the past week Quarterly Earnings Conference CallEA CEO was asked if genAI is being used to bring real world players (or “star heads”) in the game. Previous sports games required 500-1,000 star heads, but University 25 he had 11,000.
Due to the agreement reached for the game even existGetting all the stars was a “top priority,” Wilson said. “Our teams are incredible and have created workflows to facilitate that, but they’ve been amplified and accelerated through AI and machine learning.”
EA Orlando's workflows and photographic images allowed genAI and machine learning to generate star heads, after which artists would “touch up and improve” them. He said it was preferable to the full head development process, though University 25 it had been in the works for “many, many years.”
“In the absence of artificial intelligence we simply would not have been able to provide College Football at the level that we did it,” he concluded.
Machine learning is nothing new to video games, but the term “generative AI” comes with a stigma.
Wilson also argued that using genAI has helped build the future of College Football as a game series: It was a decade since the last installment, and the “level of playability and visual fidelity” would not have been possible to achieve now or even years ago without technology.
Use cases like College Football 25 seem to justify the use of genAI, as they make large-scale projects feasible and do not appear to replace human workersQuestions still remain about what datasets, if any, were used to train the technology.
An early year report revealed almost half of game developers surveyed are already using genAI in their workforce. Some companies have developed (or are developing) tools based on the technology to artdesign and write.
For now, publishers like EA and Ubisoft are simply using machine learning to lighten the load between their studios. Outside of KeywordApparently no one is trying to make a game with genAI, which the studio itself has stated is not possible.