For various reasons, it has been a hard week in the gaming industry and beyond. There have been controversies galore, and the week still isn’t over yet! One of the biggest controversies this week concerning sports, gaming, and comics involves AI. This is a subject that isn’t going to get less debated because of how certain companies, like EA, are fine with using it so long as it “suits their needs.” A great example of this is EA Sports College Football 25. The game recently came out and is apparently doing well for EA. So much so that its CEO admitted how much AI had a role in helping the game come out on time.
The reveal came during an investors call; CEO Andrew Wilson admitted that AI had a big help in making the game via the number of players they had to successfully replicate for the college title:
“[T]he 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.”
Admittedly, that’s quite a jump, yet it was required to get the game to the “authentic” level that EA Sports wanted it to be. They asked players to sign up to be in EA Sports College Football 25 and paid the ones who did to keep things fair. Once that was done, the process to get them in the game needed to be “sped up” to get the game out on time:
“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.”
As ironic as it may sound, this isn’t the worst thing ever, and EA might have been smart to create this kind of creation in this way. The issue with AI in gaming is that many fear it will take away people’s jobs and put out “less quality products.” Here, they were just trying to get “heads” that didn’t do much outside of looking like the actual athletes.
This is in contrast to former NFL Quarterback Colin Kapernick, who recently announced a company that would be making AI comics that would have art entirely made by an AI program, which hurts the industry he’s trying to get into. Yeah, he won’t be back in Madden anytime soon.
