EA head Andrew Wilson has some potentially controversial, but also oddly optimistic, things to say about AI.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Andrew attended this week’s Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. Andrew believes AI will make EA’s game development considerably more efficient, and that comes with it a lot of benefits.
More efficient game development means that EA will finish making games faster. And the faster they make games, the easier it will be for them to make deeper experiences in games. And that will also make it easier for them to get their players to spend, and to also get more people playing games.
Andrew gave numbers too. He gives out a figure of 30 % more efficient game development. Andrew also claims that EA’s 700 million players will grow by at least 50 %, and that those players will spend 10 to 20 % more money.
Here’s Andrew’s floor pitch to those Morgan Stanley attendees, and now, the world:
“What we’ve seen every time there’s been a meaningful technological advancement in media and in technology, where you are able to democratise an industry and hand it over to the population at large, incredible things happen.
And so, the way we think about this is how do we build these things to be more efficient? How do we build these things to allow us to build deeper, broader, more deep, more personal experiences? And then how do we give that to the world.
And once you give that to the world where you have three billion players around the world creating personal content and expanding and enhancing the universes that we create, and building and creating their own universe on our technology platform, all of a sudden we are the beneficiaries of platform economics.
And for me that’s a multi-billion dollar opportunity for us in addition to what we would otherwise get from our regular growth.”
Andrew also claims that EA’s developers have already embraced AI. He says:
“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.”
While a lot of attention to AI in video games has revolved around generative art, it sounds like EA already left that discourse behind. Of course, there’s tons of ways people can find to make work more efficient with AI. It sounds like that was the direction that EA took, and they may have applied them in ways completely esoteric for people outside the industry.
Well, we don’t know if EA will ever elaborate on how they are using AI in video game development, but we do know we’ll find out if it works like they think it will soon enough, when we get to play these new video games partly made by AI ourselves.
