EA CEO Claims Without AI, They Wouldn’t Be Able to Deliver College Football 25 at the Level It’s At Even With “Many, Many Years” of Dev Time

It’s safe to say that EA Sports College Football 25 is a gigantic success for publisher Electronic Arts (EA), and according to the company’s CEO, Andrew Wilson, this couldn’t be achieved without using AI (Artificial Intelligence) in development.

During the Q&A portion of EA’s quarterly earnings call, Wilson explains how AI helped the devs accomplish something they couldn’t even with the “many, many years” of development time given to the studio. Read on for Wilson’s statement and how they used AI to help hasten the development of star player heads in the football sim.

There was a question earlier around AI as it related to College. And the reality is, is we had an incredible team working on this, but we had to get 11,000 new star player heads into the game. For those that don’t track our industry or track our sports games in particular, we typically in any given year will develop about 500 to 1000 star heads inside of one of our games.

And 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.

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.

Wilson’s statement does paint a good future for AI in the development of games — at least in this instance. The worry that AI will put some people out of jobs is still a big concern not just in game development but in a lot of other employment areas as well.

In the same Q&A, Wilson revealed that the in-development Battlefield game is one of the “most ambitious projects” in EA’s history.

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