‘EA Sports College Football 25’ wouldn’t exit if AI wasn’t used during the game’s development, the company’s CEO Andrew Wilson has said.
EA Sports College Football 25 wouldn’t exit if AI wasn’t used during the game’s development, the company’s CEO Andrew Wilson has said
The newly-released sports title has managed to surpass both internal expectations at the studio and sales numbers, though the EA boss has now revealed this wouldn’t have been possible without machine-learning, which was utilised when crafting the character models for each of the players.
During a recent earnings call, Wilson was asked whether AI was used in development, to which he said: “Over the course of a platform generation, through the hand tooling of that, we ultimately fill out the full roster of star heads in our games. And of course there are ebbs and flows in that. But as we were launching ‘College’ on a new generation of platforms, to a new generation of fans with the world’s largest single sport NIL deal, where image was a really important part of the process, getting 11,000 star heads into the game was a top priority for us.”
He explained: “The reality is our teams are incredible and built workflows to facilitate that, but they were amplified and accelerated through AI and machine learning. And we were able to take in a whole plethora of photo imagery across 11,000 players and build workflows out where AI and machine learning would generate heads.
“And our very talented artists would be able to come in and touch up and enhance those heads, versus having to go through the full head development program.
“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.”