EA really wants people to know that they are genuinely, insanely, deeply invested in generative AI.
Taking the stage at the company’s recent investor day, EA CEO Andrew Wilson spoke about how technology is driving innovation within EA studios and said it has become “the very core of our business.”
Wilson had previously claimed 60 percent of EA's development processes could be “impacted” by generative artificial intelligenceand said the technology is something the publisher is “deeply embracing.” The comments came shortly after EA laid off 5 percent of its workforce.
Reinforcing this narrative, Wilson said that AI is not a “buzzword” for EA and noted that the company currently has more than “100 new AI projects” in development across three categories: efficiency, expansion and transformation.
Addressing the first point, Wilson said that efficiency is not simply about realizing “cost savings,” but rather “doing what we do today faster, cheaper, and with higher quality.”
“That means driving more iterations, more testing, and high-quality content for our communities. That means removing barriers for our game developers,” he added. “That means culturalizing content across geographies so they can focus on finding more fun for more players around the world. Lowering those friction points leads to deeper gaming experiences.”
Stressing this point, Wilson said that EA could not have created College Football 25 without relying on AI tools to build 150 unique stadiums and over 11,000 player likenesses. This kind of expansion is what he says EA is aiming for.
“The expansion is about giving our creative teams an exponentially larger canvas to create on and richer colors so they can paint brighter worlds. It’s about our incredible teams, creating characters with more depth and intelligence, telling more personal and nuanced stories, and bringing more authenticity and deeper immersion to our already unparalleled sports experiences,” he continued.
“For years, we've talked about our games delivering new and different experiences. We expect that with generative AI, we'll really be able to deliver on that promise for billions of people, for billions and billions of hours.”
As for transformation? Wilson sees it as about looking far into the future and considering how AI can deliver experiences that can’t be “imagined today.”
“We believe AI will dramatically expand and transform the entertainment experience for user-generated content,” he added. “It will accelerate how entertainment innovators and creators are building and delivering experiences rooted in self-expression, content creation, curation and instant gratification—the kind of entertainment today’s gamers and fans deeply desire.”
He said that once EA’s biggest franchises are “augmented by AI,” the company will be able to cultivate massive online communities, tell compelling stories, and harness the power of players “beyond the limits” of video games. Sure, it doesn’t sound much different from what many studios are already doing.
EA Reflects on a Generative AI Future Where Players and Developers Form a 'Symbiotic Relationship'
EA Entertainment and Technology President Laura Miele was singing along with the same tune. Taking over for Wilson, she explained that EA is in the midst of a multiyear effort to centralize decades of 3D data and assets to bolster its development teams and Frostbite game engine.
He said the “Smithsonian” scale library has allowed EA to train its own large machine learning and language models with its own proprietary data. Those models can then be used by internal teams like the Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division (SEED), which Miele described as an “innovation lab.”
SEED is currently focused on areas such as “AI game development, generative art, and procedural content,” including a tool called “Script to Scene” that can bring together multiple workflows to help developers create characters, direct performances, and build worlds using text or voice input.
He explained that EA teams could use the tool to instantly generate a “four-story Parisian apartment building,” before prompting for changes with additional prompts like “add more floors to the building” (as shown below). Miele said the technology could be used to create entire neighborhoods, cities, and “eventually worlds.”
Later in the presentation, EA strategy chief Mihir Vaidya took the baton and said that EA plans to deliver tools like “Script to Scene” to players so they can “transform their imagination into creations without any coding skills.”
He then clarified that “Imagination to Creation” will not allow players to create, distribute, and support entire video games (at least not at first), but it will allow them to create robust user-generated experiences (UGX).
Introducing a short concept video that brought together some of EA’s “most exciting experiments,” Vaidya showed how the company’s AI tools could be used to create impossible and previously incomprehensible realities, like a “game made out of cardboard boxes.”
“Make a cardboard box maze,” a disembodied player voice says during the demo video. That prompt led to the creation of a simple level made from everyone’s favorite shipping material.
Disappointed with their original cardboard maze, the unnamed players then ask their AI enabler to make the level “more complex” and “multi-layered.” The image below is what EA imagines its “Imagination to Creation” toolkit might then churn out.
The video ends with two players engaged in a custom 1v1 deathmatch where only grenades are lethal. Both players were shown choosing between weapons and characters from existing EA franchises like Battlefield and Apex Legends, suggesting that EA sees its “Imagination to Creation” toolkit as an open sandbox filled with remixable gameplay systems, assets, and logic from its larger series.
Vaidya said that EA wants players to be able to use that AAA content as the “base” for those UGX experiences, perhaps eventually turning those creations into “ranked IP.”
“This would create a new level of symbiotic relationship between our developers and the creators of UGX, and one with our IPs as launch pads for new experiences and activities,” he added. We’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s a good thing.
You can watch the full EA Investor Day presentation right here.