Generative AI Will Allow Bigger, More Immersive Worlds, Says EA, and Developers Were ‘Hungry’ for It

Ever since last year, generative AI has been on everyone's lips as it promised to disrupt most industries. The highly tech-based games industry is, of course, no exception.

Speaking to investors during the Q4 2024 earnings call, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson said the company estimates over half of its development processes could be improved through the use of generative AI, eventually leading to the creation of bigger, more immersive game worlds over the course of three to five years. Wilson also commented that EA studios were 'hungry' to tackle generative AI since it could accelerate the rush to gaming's holy grail: better, more innovative games created more quickly. Here's the excerpt from the transcript (via The Motley Fool):

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As we think about the first pillar of generative AI for us, we're really looking at how it can make us more efficient, how it can give our developers more power, how it can 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 a meaningful opportunity for us. We've done analysis across all of our development processes. 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.

We've got teams across the company really looking to execute against that. The second phase for us, of course, is how we further expand our games. How do we build bigger worlds with more characters and more interesting storylines? If efficiency starts to really take place over the next 1-3 years, our expectation is that over a 3-5 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.

Perhaps on a 5-year plus time horizon, we think about how