EA Embraces AI: The Future of Video Game Design and Development

EA's going all in on AI for video game design

The developer says AI will make video games more nuanced and believable. Game design looks set to the be nest frontier for generative AI. We've already seen Google researchers make an AI Doom recreation, and Tencent recently revealed initial researching into what could become an open-world game generator. Now Electronic Arts (EA), the video game giant behind Battlefield, The Sims and FIFA, has confirmed what we already suspected: it's going all in on generative AI. At EA's Investors Day, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson said AI has always been part of the company's creative journey. The company now has "over 100 active novel AI projects" underway as it aims to "accelerate how innovators and creators are building entertainment experiences leading to self-expression, content creation, curation, and instant gratification." Andrew said EA's AI work is focusing on three strategic areas: efficiency, expansion, and transformation. The first of those means doing things faster, and at a higher quality through more iteration and more testing, and, of course, more cheaply. Meanwhile, expansion, means giving developers an "exponentially bigger canvas upon which they can create and richer colors to paint more brilliant worlds" with deeper characters and "stories that are more personal and nuanced." Finally, the area of transformation involves investigating potential new ways to play and watch games and to create user-generated content in ways that haven't so far been envisioned. Chief Strategy Officer Mihir Vaidya talked about experiments in what EA sees as a huge space of opportunity between user-generated experiences (UGX) and imagination to game, an area that the company is calling 'imagination to creation'. That appears to include open sandboxes where players can create and modify games instantaneously using natural language through an AI model based on EA's own proprietary dataset. "We all remember playing against the AI, and it has evolved in today's innovations in generative AI," Andrew told investors. "This remarkable technology is not merely a buzzword for us. It's the very core of our business." "Beyond writing or coding AI to ensure the believability of our characters, we have always used forms of machine learning and AI across our games and processes,," he added, arguing that EA Sports College Football 25 wouldn't have been possible without the use of AI to allow the game's 150 unique stadiums and 11,000 players. EA also announced new AI-powered features for The Sims 4, including a visual search for content uploaded to the Gallery and the ability to generate Create-A-Sim outfits based on provided images. The news received mixed reactions among fans, with some claiming that it would take the fun out of the game.

Electronic Arts has over 100 active AI projects in development, CEO hypes up generative AI

EA has over 100 artificial intelligence projects in the works, including multiple generative AI technologies. During today's Investor's Day 2024 stream, EA announced that it was going all-in on AI. Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson outlined many of the key ways that the billion-dollar publisher currently is and plans to use AI across its multitude of games, content, and services. Wilson also hyped up generative AI, saying that it will be instrumental in unlocking EA's long-term value for investors and consumers alike. EA will use its artificial intelligence tools across three key areas: Efficiency, to speed along game development; Expansion, to greatly enhance the worlds available to devs and gamers; and Transformation, which could completely revolutionize the way users create, share, and play custom games content. "This pursuit of innovation has led our games to be at the forefront of the technology curve. AI in its different forms has always been central to this creative journey. We all remember playing against the AI, and it has evolved in today's innovations in generative AI," EA CEO Andrew Wilson said during the stream. "This remarkable technology is not merely a buzzword for us. It's the very core of our business. "Beyond writing, or coding AI, to ensure the believability of our characters, we have always used forms of machine learning and AI across our games and processes. "Right now, we have over 100 active novel AI projects across 3 strategic categories: Efficiency, expansion, and transformation. "For years we have talked about our games delivering experiences that are always new and different. We predict that with generative AI, we will truly be able to fulfill this promise for billions of people, for billions and billions of hours." Read Also: EA's new experimental AI tech could change gaming forever Wilson goes on to highlight how EA is using AI for efficiency. "This is not just about cost-savings. Efficiency is doing what we do today faster, cheaper, and it a higher quality. That means driving more iterations, more testing, and more high-quality content for our communities. It means removing obstacles for our game developers." The CEO confirms that College Football 25 was developed using AI, saying that the tech was used to create the game's 150 unique stadiums and 11,000 player likenesses. "Expansion is about giving our creative teams an exponentially bigger canvas upon which to create, and richer colors so that they might paint more brilliant worlds. It's about our incredible teams creating characters with more depth and intelligence, telling stories that are more personal and nuanced, and bringing more authenticity and deeper immersion to our already unrivaled sports experiences." When it comes to Transformation, EA has some incredibly ambitious ideas that could completely revolutionize how gamers create, share, and play customized content. EA has created an experimental ChatGPT-like AI prompt tool that allows users to create in-game maps and jump right into the action, all through text language. You basically just tell the AI what you want, and it will render it instantly on the screen. "Transformation is about looking far into the future for new ways to play, watch, create, and connect that aren't imagined today. We believe AI will greatly expand and transform the entertainment experience for user-generated content. It will accelerate how creators and innovators are building and delivering experiences rooted in self-expression, content creation, curation, and instant gratification." EA wants to scale AI tech across all forms of its business, especially games with robust live services like its annualized sports titles. Other games like Skate and The Sims are also prime candidates for these experimental innovations.

EA Says AI Is 'the Very Core' of Its Business: What Does That Mean? - IGN

On Tuesday, Electronic Arts (EA) held its annual Investor Day -- a three-hour presentation intended for its investors to learn more about the company's direction and promises to make them money in the coming year. But you'd be forgiven if you thought this was some sort of AI tech conference given how effusively the technology was brought up and touted as a key component of EA's future. While we've known for a while that EA and a number of other gaming companies are experimenting with and investing heavily in AI, it was nonetheless a bit overwhelming just how often AI came up throughout the entire presentation. It was mentioned it just about every single segment in some capacity, had its own dedicated segment near the end, and was described during CEO Andrew Wilson's introductory speech as "the very core of our business" -- a rather shocking new mission statement for a company that ostensibly makes and publishes video games. We watched the entirety of the three-hour Investor Day presentation, and did our best to round up all the AI "highlights" in an effort to paint a picture of what, exactly, EA is doing with AI and what we can expect to see in the coming years if its investments and interest in the tech pan out. The first mention of AI in the presentation took place right at the top, in Andrew Wilson's opening speech. In addition to referring to AI as "the very core of our business" and "not merely a buzzword," he announced that EA apparently has over 100 active "novel AI projects" in the works right now, ranging from the practical to the very experimental. Wilson divvied these up into three categories: efficiency, expansion, and transformation. Wilson describes the "efficiency" projects as not just cost-saving, but related to doing things faster, cheaper, and at "higher quality." Specifically, he cites College Football 25, saying the developers could not have made the game's 150 different stadiums and over 11,000 player likenesses without AI. Wilson elaborated by saying he believes AI can give developers "richer colors" to paint "more brilliant worlds" and make characters with "more depth and intelligence" while offering "more authenticity and deeper immersion" to the company's sports games. And for transformation, Wilson describes this as looking into the future and finding entirely new kinds of experiences that don't currently exist in games, especially around user-generated content. Chief strategy officer Mihir Vaidya went into more depth about what the "transformation" element will mean for EA in a later section, but Wilson's opener made it clear that he's more than bullish on the technology. In the talks that followed, a number of EA leads highlighted ways in which EA was already working with AI tech in its existing games. Laura Miele, president of EA entertainment, technology, and central development, talked about something called The Sims Hub, the first AI features coming to The Sims universe. EA plans to release a platform with "supercharged discovery tools" that use AI to allow players to find user-generated content more easily. She showed off an AI application that uses a photo search feature, allowing users to drop in photos of real life houses and then find user-generated houses that look similar to them. Miele also highlighted how the AI can be used for character creation, with users able to drop in an image of a celebrity or person in a certain outfit and then generate a Sim that matches up. Miele says The Sims Hub will be released "soon." On the internal tech side, Miele talked about EA's asset library, which she described as "like the Smithsonian of game assets." Essentially, EA has a massive database of assets from all of its games and work behind the scenes over the years, and it's using it to train its machine learning capabilities and large language models. Those capabilities are then being used by the company's "SEED" innovation lab, aka "Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division", for things like EA's "Script to Scene" tool. Script to Scene lets developers "create characters, direct performances, and define worlds all from text." Miele shows an example on screen, prompting an AI chat assistant to "build me a Parisian-style residential building." She then asks to make it taller, changes it to a modern high rise, and expands it into a larger neighborhood. With Script to Scene, Miele claims EA developers could eventually make an entire scene in a game using simple text prompts. After Miele, president of EA Sports Cam Weber took the stage to talk about, well, EA Sports. He showed off the already announced FC IQ, which uses "tactical AI" and real-world data to more accurately simulate how players and teams play together in EA Sports FC 25. And he highlighted Wilson's prior statements about using AI in College Football 25, noting that the stadium creator AI tools in particular reduced creation time "by about 70%" and allowed developers to focus on building the "pageantry" and unique traditions of each school instead. "The investment in these tools and tech will benefit the rest of our portfolio in the months and years ahead," he said. And finally, chief experience officer David Tinson briefly talked about an early prototype of a predictive simulation tool EA is working on. He claims the tool will combine EA game data, AI, and IQ ratings to allow users to run more accurate simulations and answer questions of which team would win in a match, who would have won in a hypothetical match, and which team is the best. If all that somehow wasn't enough AI chatter for you, chief strategy officer Mihir Vaidya took the stage next to talk about AI and nothing but. He opened by comparing the technology to the advent of makeup tutorial videos and cat videos, which he says people initially dismissed as trivial or niche, but now are ubiquitous and wildly popular. He says EA's experimental AI efforts should be viewed the same way as "early YouTube videos", and that while what he shows might feel rudimentary, it will naturally get better as AI improves. Vaidya was specifically brought onstage to talk about the "transformation" portion of AI that Wilson mentioned earlier. He says the experiences he shows onstage are "not intended to replace AAA games, but instead unlock new and adjacent categories that add as opposed to take away from the existing gaming market." Those "new and adjacent categories" Vaidya wanted to show off largely seem to involve apps of some sort that let people use AI to shuffle around EA proprietary assets and spit out minigames of a sort. One example he shows involves two people asking an AI to "make a maze out of cardboard boxes." They then ask the AI to make it more complex, then multi-level. Then they ask the AI to "make two characters with weapons," allowing them to select from a gallery of existing EA characters before settling on two that purport to be community-designed, then equip them with guns from a library of weapons. They then select from a handful of game modes and start chasing each other around the cardboard maze. The video ends with one of them asking the AI to "make it more epic," resulting in a giant cardboard box pyramid seemingly appearing in real-time to the astonishment of the two players. In a second demonstration, Vaidya wants to demonstrate how AI can be used to create "more believable characters" that players care about even more. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see much of that in action, as Vaidya encourages investors to check out the demo at the investor event after the presentation is over. But we do see a few seconds of what he's talking about: an AI version of soccer star Jude Bellingham is apparently available to answer questions posed by investors using AI to simulate his likeness, voice, and likely responses. Vaidya demonstrates by asking him what it was like to play at Bernabéu "in front of millions of screaming fans." Bellingham briefly explains the indescribable thrill of the experience in a flat monotone, expressionless. Finally, Vaidya demonstrates how EA wants to use AI for "social ecosystems", specifically something codenamed Project AIR. Project AIR seems to be a way to use short text prompts to generate characters, have text-based interactions with them, and then share those conversations with friends. In his example, he creates a "legendary investor" character using the prompt, "A high-stakes VC who swims in the deep waters of innovation." He then decides the "game" will be to pitch business ideas to him. In an interface that looks suspiciously like Tik-Tok, the user pitches "self-tying shoes" only to be slapped down. He then invites a friend to help him pitch, but lost for any ideas on how to make self-tying shoes more interesting, he uses an AI co-pilot to write the pitch for him, which ultimately succeeds. That's a lot of noise about AI, almost an astonishing amount even from a company we knew was pushing the tech hard. And it's a lot of noise specifically about generative AI. Artificial intelligence, broadly, has been used in games for decades. But generative AI, which is involved in most of the things EA shared yesterday, is different. Generative AI effectively spits out brand new images, text, sound, or other content based on data it's fed, which has led to numerous ethical questions regarding its use. Some of those EA has managed to answer effectively. For instance, EA is training its AI on its own proprietary material, so there's seemingly no concern about it stealing copyrighted work (we've reached out to EA for comment). But other concerns remain. There's the environmental impact, for one, which we've also asked EA about. And then there's issues of using personal likenesses. EA says Jude Bellingham agreed to let EA train an AI on his likeness and voice for the model we saw yesterday, but will EA ensure it has permission from every single individual it uses in the future? What about voice actors for beloved characters, who are still at this moment on strike from companies including AI over these exact protections? We've asked EA for comment on all this, too. On the game development side, how does this implementation of AI impact individual creatives at the company? It's easy to say that tools such as Script to Scene are intended to free up developers to work on other things. But it's a practical reality that the games industry has seen two years of unprecedented layoffs just as AI is beginning to creep into the mainstream, and EA has been a part of that. There are no guarantees that this tech might not eventually be used to replace developers eventually. Developers have said over and over that they are rightfully nervous about this possibility, but neither EA nor its investors seem to be especially interested in addressing that. Nor does it seem apparent to them the difference between the intentional, creative work of designers assembling a thoughtful map for a shoorter, and anyone at all prompting an AI to spit out a random array of cardboard boxes. It's all content to be sold in the end. As some have pointed out online, EA is no stranger to pushing hard on new tech before immediately backing off the second the wind changed. But this feels different. EA leadership made it abundantly clear at the Investor Day that the company is already very, very deep in on AI even if the experiments themselves are still in their infancy. Investors might be kept happy by these experiments, but perhaps fans of EA's 40-year history as a video game company ought to be asking why AI, not games, has suddenly become the "core" of its business.

AI is "the very core of our business", says EA CEO

EA CEO Andrew Wilson has stated AI is "the very core of our business" and the company has over a hundred "active novel AI projects" to assist with game development. Yesterday, the company held its Investor Day 2024, detailing its next games and innovations: including the likes of The Sims, Star Wars Jedi and Battlefield. Yet AI was a major part of the presentation. Speaking of generative AI, Wilson said: "This remarkable technology is not merely a buzzword for us, it's the very core of our business." The company has over a hundred AI projects, said Wilson, across three strategic categories. Efficiency is not just about cost saving but "doing what we do today faster, cheaper, and at a higher quality", he said. Expansion is about "giving our creative teams an exponentially bigger canvas upon which to create" by adding depth and intelligence to characters and personalising stories. Lastly, the company will accelerate innovation and the creation of content through Transformation. "For years we have talked about our games delivering experiences that are always new and different," said Wilson. "We predict that with generative AI we will truly be able to fulfil this promise for billions of people for billions and billions of hours." So how are these AI projects being put into practice? Laura Miele, president of EA Entertainment and Technology, spoke at length about AI opportunities - after briefly running through forthcoming single-player games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the Star Wars Jedi games, as well as the likes of Apex Legends and The Sims. At present, EA's current game-development infrastructure handles a billion AI requests daily, Miele said, while the company's AI tools power in-game features for stable game experience, personal recommendations, and create a fair and secure gaming environment. One specific example of AI use is in The Sims for its forthcoming hub that acts as a central platform for all series games. AI is powering discovery tools so that Sims players can search for suitable in-game assets using photos rather than text. Through photo-based searching, players can find housing elements or even upload a photo of a real human to create their likeness. While powerful, there's also potential for this sort of function to be abused. Another example is EA's new Script to Scene tool, which essentially allows game development to be done through text or voice prompts. This includes creating characters and scenes, as well as direct performances, all using generative art, AI-enabled game development, and procedural generation. These are clear examples of how AI is already impacting game development. Indeed, as Eurogamer reported in March, AI is already used by 62 percent of studios, according to a report by Unity. Character animation was the biggest use case. And just yesterday, Eurogamer reported on Nvidia boss Jensen Huang who discussed the advantages of AI as a key component for advancing graphical capabilities. Other areas of AI use are for NPCs, scriptwriting, and voice acting, which have all received criticism. For more on AI in game development, check out our feature on how AI is changing video game development forever.

EA CEO Says Generative AI Is the Very Core of Business, Not a Buzzword

During the EA Investor Day, which also saw the confirmation of the third installment in the Star Wars Jedi series, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson outlined the core importance of generative AI for the company's future. Following up on his previous statement that generative AI will allow bigger and more immersive worlds, Wilson explained how EA is using this technology for its upcoming projects as part of its bid to outpace market growth through 2027 and double the audience to over a billion users. AI in its different forms has always been central to this creative journey. We all remember playing against the AI, and it has evolved into today's innovations in generative AI. This remarkable technology is not merely a buzzword for us; it's the very core of our business. Beyond writing or coding AI to ensure the believability of our characters, we have always used forms of machine learning and AI across our games and processes. Right now, we have over 100 active novel AI projects across three strategic categories: efficiency, expansion, and transformation. Let me first talk about efficiency. This does not just mean cost savings today. Efficiency is doing what we do today faster, cheaper, and at a higher quality. That means driving more iterations, more testing and high quality content for our communities. It means removing obstacles for our game developers. It means culturalizing content across geographies so they can focus on finding more fun for more players around the world. The lowering of these friction points leads to deeper gameplay experiences. Expansion is about giving our creative teams an exponentially bigger canvas upon which to create and richer colors so they might paint more brilliant worlds. It's about our incredible teams creating characters with more depth and intelligence, telling stories that are more personal and nuanced, and bringing more authenticity and deeper immersion. For years, we at EA have talked about our games delivering experiences that are always new and different. We predict that with generative AI, we will truly be able to fulfill this promise for billions of people and billions of hours. Transformation is about looking much farther into the future and finding new ways to play, watch, create, and connect that aren't imagined today. We believe AI will greatly expand and transform the entertainment experience for user generated content. It will accelerate how innovators and creators in entertainment are building and delivering experiences rooted in self-expression, content creation, curation, and instant gratification, the kind of entertainment that today's players and fans deeply crave. Bold words indeed from the EA CEO, although Electronic Arts is not at all the only big company to believe in generative AI's potential to disrupt the gaming industry. Microsoft, for instance, partnered with Inworld AI to create a multiplatform AI-powered toolset for game developers. Ubisoft also showed off an interesting demo at GDC 2024 powered by Inworld AI tech. Electronic Arts appears to be developing an in-house solution rather than relying on a third party. Either way, we might be looking at an influx of games featuring some sort of generative AI implementation in the next few years.

EA execs say generative AI is "not merely a buzzword for us, it's the very core of our business," then pretend to tell a computer to generate buildings live on stage

EA gathered a whole bunch of executives and bean counters together for a lengthy Investor Day presentation today, September 17, much of which gave two big thumbs up to myriad forms of generative AI, an increasingly divisive topic in the games industry and a driving reason behind the video game actor strike. "AI in its different forms has always been central to this creative journey," begins EA CEO Andrew Wilson. "We all remember playing against the AI. And it has evolved into today's innovations in generative AI. This remarkable technology is not merely a buzzword for us - it's the very core of our business." Wilson correctly points out that AI is, and has been, fundamental to many aspects of game development and logic, then quickly goes all-in on generative AI specifically. Some fundamental elements of EA's vision, like leveraging AI as a tool to be held by human hands, have seen support across the industry, but the publisher's approach seems a bit heavier-handed compared to the likes of Nintendo or even Sony. "Right now we have over 100 active novel AI projects across three strategic categories: efficiency, expansion, and transformation," Wilson explains, diving right into efficiency. "This does not just mean cost savings today. Efficiency is doing what we're doing today faster, cheaper, and at a higher quality. That means driving more iteration, more testing, and higher quality content for our community. It means removing obstacles for our game developers. It means culturalizing content across geographies so they can focus on finding more fun for more players around the world." "The lowering of these friction points leads to deeper gameplay experiences," he continues. "For example, we would not have created the smash hit College Football 25 without AI. That's how 150 unique stadiums and over 11,000 player likenesses are in the game." Again, this College Football example parallels one of the more popular or at least widely embraced applications of AI: let humans use it to speed up a job that humans don't need to do. It's that boundary, what needs a human touch, that gets a bit blurry in EA's full-throated AI roadmap. "Expansion is about giving our creative team an exponentially bigger canvas upon which to create, and richer colors so they might paint more brilliant worlds," Wilson espouses. "It's about our incredible teams creating characters with more depth and intelligence, telling stories that are more personal and nuanced, and bringing more authenticity and deeper immersion to our already unrivaled sports experiences." Fellow AAA publisher Ubisoft has similarly talked up AI-powered NPCs, often with strange results. "We believe AI will greatly expand and transform the entertainment experience for user-generated content," Wilson concludes. "It will accelerate how innovators and creators in entertainment are building and delivering experiences rooted in self-expression, content creation, curation, and instant gratification - the kind of entertainment that today's players and fans deeply crave." The mic is then passed to Laura Miele, president of EA entertainment and technology, who revisits AI and generative AI later in the presentation. "We cannot talk about technology without talking about AI," she reckons. Miele also brings some color to Wilson's earlier claim: "Today our team manages over 100 machine learning and large language models on the central platform." The shape and output of these systems is the focus of a section on SEED, or the Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division, and a shared asset library tethered to many AI initiatives. The two key questions with AI, Miele says, are these: "How will it benefit our players' experience? And how will it enable our developers to do their very best work?" To answer them, she points to EA's Frostbite engine, "which only gets more powerful when paired with our shared data." "We are in a multi-year effort to centralize decades of high quality 3D data and assets," she explains. "This library is like the Smithsonian of game assets. They are fully curated, labeled, and exclusive to our teams. This provides our developers with a wealth of content that allows for rapid prototyping, but also game-ready assets they can quickly modify to go directly in their games." Again, a lot of this sounds like some of the more accepted upsides and purposes of AI in the games industry. In fact, this section, in particular, is pretty normal game engine stuff - access to assets which can, at the very least, serve as a ready-made basis for prototyping. It's the relationship between this asset library and the aforementioned SEED initiative that may raise eyebrows among the less AI-hungry. "This library also serves another essential purpose in that it educates our machine learning and large language models with our proprietary data, and as you would imagine this has become more and more critical in this new age of AI," Miele adds. "This group of researchers, PHDs, and data scientists are focused on areas such as AI-enabled game development, generative arts, and procedural content to push the boundaries of what is possible in interactive experiences," Miele says of SEED. "One of the exciting projects they're working on is called Script to Scene. This initiative aggregates multiple workflows to create a powerful tool for developers to create characters, direct performances, and define worlds all from text." This is where the wheels on this presentation really threaten to lose their grip on the tracks. In a video demonstration showing how this Script to Scene project can turn prompts into assets or even experiences, which does notably have a disclaimer that it "depicts early-stage concept only," EA briefly shows off a female character (above) who can purportedly be generated "from just a photo" and then animated and rigged "using just a voice." The crown jewel of this presentation is a demonstration on AI-generated buildings. Miele, loosely keeping pace with a video showing a chatbot-esque exchange between a user and an AI interface, requests a Parisian apartment building. Poof! A building appears on-screen. "I don't know, let's maybe make it taller," she asks. And lo, the building gets taller. "Let's do a modern high-rise building," she says, at which point this AI - rather, this video example of AI - spits out a bizarre amalgamation of uneven, amorphous floors covered in random white external walls that look like concrete scaffolding. "Zooming out even further, the technology can extend to neighborhoods, cities, and eventually worlds that populate gaming environments, instantaneously," Miele says. "If you add to these workflows procedural performance direction, intelligent agents, you get this amazing collection of AI-generated actions that culminate into a scene from a simple text or voice prompt." EA doubles down, stopping just short of pouncing on the phrase that is the dream of every AAA investor: Computer, make me a video game. You could argue that this kind of moonshot proposal is exactly what stirs up the AI "buzzword" discourse Wilson alludes to.

EA's experimental AI tech could change gaming forever

Today, EA demoed its ambitious new experimental AI technology to investors, showing off ideas that could change gaming forever. During its Investor's Day stream, live service publisher Electronic Arts outlined specific ideas on how to best use generative AI to transform gaming experiences. In one of the AI concepts, dubbed "Imagination to Creation," EA Chief Strategy Officer Mihi Vaidya showed off a video where two gamers used a ChatGPT-like prompt to quickly create an in-game map, mode, and characters--all using EA's first-party asset library. The publisher is mining decades of game files from titles like Battlefield and Apex Legends to help fuel its vision for AI-powered User-Generated Experiences (UGX). The chat prompt is just an experimental concept, and Vadiya was careful to say that its UGX tools "aren't meant to replace AAA games." EA instead wants to use its Imagination to Creation vision to supplement AAA gaming with a new line of engagement and monetization. "We believe AI is the next great opportunity to unlock new levels of value long-term," EA CEO Andrew Wilson said in the stream. Below we have a quick transcript of what Vaidya said during the stream. His words highlight what could very well be the future of gaming in the next 5 or so years, especially given EA's heavy emphasis on live services and microtransaction-driven economies; UGC, or UGX, is powered by the kind of Roblox-like economy where users will be able to purchase in-game skins and the like, or potentially wrapped in an EA-branded subscription service.

Electronic Arts goes deep into artificial intelligence for game development

GamesBeat Next is connecting the next generation of video game leaders. And you can join us, coming up October 28th and 29th in San Francisco! Take advantage of our buy one, get one free pass offer. Sale ends this Friday, August 16th. Join us by registering here. At this year's EA Investor Day -- the game publisher's presentation event to current and prospective investors -- the future looks algorithmic as EA fully embraces AI for its game development. The phrase was peppered throughout the event's announcements, with AI involved in everything from game development to engagement capture in the periphery. In on example, EA COO Laura Miele mentioned that AI will act as a discovery tool for the 100 million assets available to developers. This, Miele argues, would "supercharge" development by both making shared assets between teams easier to find and easier to use. No longer will they have to struggle if they aren't sure something that fits their game is already sitting finished and waiting to be used. At another juncture, EA emphasized the use of AI for their EA Sports brand, the biggest sub-brand for Electronic Arts. Using a tactical AI system, EA Sports will leverage real world data to reflect how real teams and teammates play together. An ongoing issue of chemistry between two teammates that emerges throughout a season can be shown within the currently released titles in theory and not have to wait for it to be programmed into a new game. All-in-all, Electronic Arts is diving headfirst into AI and machine learning in both developer- and consumer-facing angles.