According to the CEO of EA, AI can positively impact the gaming industry and help developers save time.
Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson said that almost 60% of the game development process could be ‘positively impacted’ by using artificial intelligence. After announcing that the company will be laying off nearly 670 employees and cancelling a number of projects, Electronic Arts has been under fire in recent weeks.
Recently, at a tech conference, CEO Andrew Wilson took to the stage and spoke about how artificial intelligence’s impact on game development is mostly positive. According to Wilson, with the use of AI in development, something that previously took six weeks to complete can now take just a few days.
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Gaming Industry Positively Impacted By AI
CEO Andrew Wilson attended the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco, explaining the benefits of generative AI in game development. Wilson said that generative AI is “incredibly exciting” and something Electronic Arts is “embracing deeply.”
We’re in the era of generative AI which is the most exciting yet by a fairly wide margin and something that we’re embracing deeply. We think about it in three core vectors: efficiency, expansion, and transformation.
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? And 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.
Andrew Wilson on AI’s Impact on Game Development
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Wilson claims that while getting developers to embrace the technology is a necessary step in the process, AI tools will ultimately allow creators to reach greatness more quickly. For example, he stated that using generative AI increased the number of run cycles in EA Sports FC 24 from 12 to 1,200. Furthermore, Wilson claimed this made the game experience more unique and immersive.
Wilson has also expressed his excitement about the potential of artificial intelligence to produce “deeper, more immersive experiences” and “more personalization, culturalisation,” which could encourage players to interact with games and spend more money on games.
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.
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.
Although Wilson admits that generative AI is still in its early stages, he believes the technology has a bright future and the ability to draw in a large number of new players and connect them into a more personal and monetised video game environment.
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