Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson has said its College Football 25 developers implementing AI technology was critical for creating a game that lived up to its quality standards and impressed fans. Speaking during EA’s latest earnings briefing, Wilson said AI “amplified and accelerated” the development on the game.
“In the absence of AI, we simply would not have been able to deliver College Football at the level we did, even though we’d given the team many, many years in development. It was the first time we had done it in 10 years, and the level of gameplay and the level of visual fidelity that we did, was a combination of many years of work of our incredible teams, amplified and accelerated by AI,” he said. “Something that we just wouldn’t have been able to do as little as two or three years ago.”
Prior to launch, EA explained how it was “never going to be a viable option” to create CFB 25’s thousands of players manually by scanning them all into the game and using human hands alone to do it. Instead, EA used AI and a machine-learning toolset to create the character models. EA inputted “hundreds” of head shapes, hairstyles, skin tones, complexions, beards, and brows into the model. Using this data, along with a single reference photo of the athlete or coach in question, EA said it was able to create the player likenesses in the game.
In total, College Football 25 features about 11,390 real players, along with 5,000 or so player models for coaches, fans, and created players, totaling more than 16,000 character models.
College Football 25 was in development for years, but things really ramped up in February 2024 when EA signed Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals with college athletes for the game. That happened just five months before the game launched in July 2024. Using machine-learning and AI was critical in helping get College Football 25 out the door on time and at the desired level of quality, Wilson said.
The executive gave this answer in response to a question about why EA decided to make College Football 25 exclusive to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, instead of bringing the game to multiple generations of consoles. Wilson said EA decided to focus on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S because that is where “the player communities are showing up at the greatest level.”
“And the uptake that we’ve seen across the new platforms would suggest that the platform decisions we made were the right ones,” Wilson said. College Football 25 reached 5 million players in its first week alone.
Before this, Wilson spoke about how AI could positively benefit EA’s games going forward, even if there is a human cost to this as well via layoffs and other job displacement.
Wilson said EA conducted a study across all of its development processes and found that 60% of development processes have a “high feasibility” of being positively impacted by generative AI. As an example, Wilson said in the past it took six months to develop a stadium in one of its sports games, and now it takes six weeks. In the future, it could take six days, he said.
EA’s ambition, Wilson said, is to use generative AI to make its development processes 30% more efficient. Wilson said EA’s development teams are driven by the desire to “get to the fun faster” and release games faster. The aim is to “get to greatness much more quickly,” he said.
Prior to this, Wilson warned that advances to AI would lead to job losses. Wilson said the “fear of displacement of the workforce” is a legitimate issue as it pertains to AI. He said history has shown that major revolutions like the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution led to “displacement” in the workforce in the near term and then “meaningful increases” in job opportunities down the road. AI could follow a similar trajectory, Wilson said.
EA is not alone in its admiration for AI. Microsoft is heavily invested in AI and has said AI will be baked into every product it makes going forward, including Xbox. Microsoft also implemented mass layoffs around the same time of pushing further into AI.
Video game actors and performers are now on strike in part over concerns about AI. Wilson, however, is not very worried about it.
