Today was EA's Q4 earnings call and with that comes statements we aren't even sure are surprising for EA anymore! Let's dive in and see what they had to say about AI and how advertising in games is being considered.

EA on AI

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has been a hot topic as of late in the gaming community. EA has used it to help create content faster in their games, making the teams more efficient and give them "more power". They believe that more than half of their development processes will be impacted by advances in generative AI.

Quote From Andrew Wilson

First is we're still very early in the AI evolution or at least the generative AI evolution. As a company, we've been deeply tied to AI since our inception. It has been the very center of all of the games that we create, replicating human intelligence in the context of a game play experience. But certainly, as we think about the wave of generative AI today and as it merges into artificial general intelligence, broadly, we're still very early. But the things I talked about in the conference was really both twofold: one, how do we get more efficient and the stat I used was we've moved from being able to create stadiums from 6 months to 6 weeks. And my expectation is that will continue to shrink over time. Maybe even more profound than that was we went from – when we build a game and we have animation and run cycles. So in FIFA 23, we had 36 run cycles, which gave you kind of believability of human performance inside of that game.

When we launched FC 24, we had 1,200 run cycles and so again, starting to add to the individuality and uniqueness of each player and delivering our players more immersion in the game, a more engaging experience that is more true to what they watch on television on a Sunday afternoon. And so as we think about the first pillar of generative AI for us, we're really looking at how can it make us more efficient, how can it give our developers more power, how can it give them back more time and allow them to get to the fun more quickly.

When we think about that, our expectation is that there is meaningful opportunity for us. We've done analysis across all of our development processes. And right now, based on our early assessment, we believe that more than 50% of our development processes will be positively impacted by the advances in generative AI. And we've got teams across the company really looking to execute against that.

The second phase for us, of course, is how do we further expand our games? How do we build bigger worlds with more characters and more interesting story lines? And if efficiency starts to really take place over the next 1 to 3 years, our expectation is that, over a 3- to 5-year time horizon, we will be able to, as part of our massive online communities and blockbuster storytelling, build bigger, more immersive worlds that engage more players uniquely around the world. And we think about that on a 3- to 5-year time horizon. And perhaps on a 5-year-plus time horizon, we think about how do we take all of those tools we create and offer those to the community at large so that we can actually get new and interesting and innovative and different types of game experiences, again, not to replace what we do but to augment, enhance, extend, expand the nature of what interactive entertainment can be in much the way YouTube did for traditional film and television.

One of the great advantages, of course, we have is we do have 40 years of data. And so as I think about efficiency over 1 to 3 years, expansion over 3 to 5 years, transformation on a 5-year time horizon, it's actually very plausible that with 40 years of owned data that we have to feed into these models, we actually might be able to accelerate that time frame. And I would tell you, there was a real hunger amongst our developers to get to this as quickly as possible because, again, the holy grail for us is to build bigger, more innovative, more creative, more fun games more quickly so that we can entertain more people around the world on a global basis at a faster rate. 

Advertisements in EA's Games

There is certainly history behind games pushing advertisements within them. Notably, the Need for Speed series where Underground 2 (and other titles) was littered with them including your SMS provider (Cingular), plenty of billboards with real advertisements, and physical locations for Best Buy and Burger King. Is this the future we want? Well, it certainly depends on the approach because in a game like Need for Speed, advertisements can make a world feel more realistic but on the other hand, if we're buying the game, maybe a deluxe edition, and also spending money on microtransactions, why in the world are we also going to be targeted by ads?

Here's what EA's CEO had to say about their approach to advertising in games which is still "early on that front".

Quote From EA

To answer your question on advertising broadly, again, I think it's still early on that front. And we have looked over the course of our history to be very thoughtful about advertising in the context of our play experiences. But again, as we think about the many, many billions of hours spent, both playing, creating, watching and connecting and where much of that engagement happens to be on the bounds of a traditional game experience, our expectation is that advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us.

We'll be very thoughtful as we move into that, but we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences. But more importantly, as we start to build community and harness the power of community beyond the bounds of our games, how do we think about advertising as a growth driver in those types of experiences?