EA Sports College Football 25 has seen substantial success - to the tune of 5 million players - and EA says the game would not have been the same without AI.

In its latest financial report, EA says that College Football 25 “welcomed 5 million unique players

into the game through its first week, with over 500,000 more playing via the EA Play trial.” The new game marks a comeback for the series after over a decade away, and clearly fans of collegiate sport have been ready for this return.

In his prepared remarks during an investor call, CEO Andrew Wilson noted that “Creating 150 unique stadiums and over 11,000 player likenesses couldn’t be done without EA’s deep history of being a technology leader and by our incredibly passionate and talented teams harnessing the power of AI and machine learning to deliver truly amazing entertainment.” Wilson had previously been quite positive about the potential of AI, saying that “more than 50% of our development process” would be impacted by the tech.

“The reality is our teams are incredible and built workflows to facilitate that, but they were amplified and accelerated through AI and machine learning,” Wilson said during a Q&A session later in the call. “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 programs. In the absence of AI we simply would not have been able to deliver College Football at the level we did, even though we’ve given the team many, many years in development.”

AI technology in the creative sphere has been extremely controversial, particularly the use of generative AI which often plagiarizes its source material from unconsenting artists and writers. College Football’s use of AI for player faces is arguably more palatable than that - you’ve got developers making use of machine learning on an internal data set in order to make an extremely tedious process reasonable to complete.

But even with that in mind, AI is the tech buzzword of the moment, and given the success of College Football 25 you can be sure EA will continue diving deep into every technology that can find room under the “AI” umbrella. After all, Activision Blizzard is reportedly already making games with AI, so the game industry arms race is on.