EA CEO Andrew Wilson has labelled generative AI “incredibly exciting” at a recent Morgan Stanley conference, claiming EA is “embracing” the technology for its potential to improve developer efficiency, and boost monetisation in games.
Per reporting from TechRaptor, Wilson described the EA game development process as “incredibly time-consuming” as games are now taking six or more years to build – but he believes generative AI could speed up this process. According to Wilson, a study of EA’s processes revealed about 60% of them could be positively impacted by AI in future.
“I would tell you in the back of my mind my orientation is “how can we use generative AI to make us 30% more efficient as a company? How in three years from today could we be 30% more efficient?”‘ Wilson said, per TechRaptor transcription.
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“I would tell you, part of that is how do we get our people to embrace it and for creators of games, this is incredibly exciting: the ability to get to the fun faster and get to market faster is the Holy Grail for them. And so we see a real embrace happening inside of our company around these things that can help them get to greatness much more quickly.”
According to Wilson, the results of these efficiencies have already been demonstrated within the FIFA / EA Sports FC series. The example given was that FIFA 23 has 12 run animation cycles for players, while EA Sports FC 24 (its successor) has 1,200 created with generative AI.
Wilson has also enthused about the potential of AI to create more “personalisation, culturalisation” and “deeper, more immersive experiences” that may entice people to engage more with games, and – of course – to spend more money in-game.
“We’re watching right now how generative AI impacts monetisation on other platforms, and what we’re seeing is where there is real personalised content, bespoke to me and bespoke to my friends, monetisation is 10 to 20% greater,” Wilson said.
“If you fast forward this over a five-year-plus time horizon, you think about where we’ve gotten to in terms of efficiency, what I would like to believe is 30% more efficient as a company, where we can attract 50% more people into our network, and hopefully by virtue of the nature of the content that we can create through generative AI, which will be created faster, and more personal to every player, then there’s 10 to 20% more monetisation opportunity to us on an ARPU [Average Revenue Per User] level.”
While Wilson acknowledge generative AI is still in its early stages, he sees a bright future for the technology’s use at EA, with vast potential for it to attract new users and bring them into a more personal, monetised video game ecosystem.
