EA sees Microsoft shitting the bed and says “hold my beer”.
According to a recent investor call, EA’s studios just can’t wait to dig in to development with generative A.I. tools.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson is the origin point for this news. In the call, he said the following:
We’ve done analysis across all of our development processes, and right now, based on our early assessment, we believe that more than 50% of our development processes will be positively impacted by the advances in generative AI, […] And we’ve got teams across the company really looking to execute against that.
Andrew Wilson
The plan is to leverage 40 years worth of EA’s proprietary IP as seed for the generative process. I have no idea how that’s supposed to work, given the fact that roughly 80% of their business for the past 3 decades has been increasingly lower-effort sports games, but I digress. They claim that this will increase efficiency over the next 3 years, and will, within the next 5, take those efficiency gains to “bigger worlds with more characters and more interesting storylines.”
“more interesting storylines”
“interesting storylines”
Wilson continued:
And I would tell you, there’s a real hunger amongst our developers to get to this as quickly as possible, because, again, the holy grail for us is to 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.
Andrew Wilson
Now, on the one hand, this isn’t necessarily out of pocket, regardless of how the internet now reacts whenever the concept of generative AI is floated around. AI tools have existed for a good while longer than this has been a hot button issue, and they’re not a bad thing when they take tedious work like animating mouth flaps off the table. On the other hand, as even Wilson concedes, CEOs have a tendency to hold up the shiny new tech thing that they consider the magic bullet for their business woes (see: NFT’s).
And perhaps on a five-year-plus time horizon, we think about how do we take all of those tools we create and offer those to the community at large so that we can actually get new and interesting and innovative and different types of game experiences, again, not to replace what we do but to augment, enhance, extend, expand the nature of what interactive entertainment can be in much the way YouTube did for traditional film and television.
Andrew Wilson
You know, I think most people have forgotten what YouTube was like back before Google bought it. A site full of 10 minute chunk, 240i, 3 part uploads of anime episodes, Crazy shit that would never be allowed today, and oh yes, we mustn’t forget the YouTube Poops, which were often enough flippant to large corporate entities. Hell, some of this didn’t stop for a good while after:
Just to really bring the point home, however, the call also saw Wilson claim that the next Battlefield game will be a “tremendous live service.“
Source: PC Gamer
About Author
