One of the biggest issues plaguing the video game industry right now is how long new games take to make. Development cycles that were as little as 18 months back in the PlayStation 2 generation have ballooned to five years or more. Do big companies think new genAI tools can bridge that gap?
That was a question EA’s president of enterprise development, Laura Miele, was asked during The Game Business Live earlier this month. “Perhaps in some parts they will,” she said in response, according to Eurogamer. “I really believe in what I’ve seen, that I’m pretty excited about. I’ve always wanted to…help our studio developers remove friction, and I’ve always kind of wanted to be a hero to them and help them create career-defining experiences.”
She continued, “And I think that AI, what I’ve seen, how AI has enabled removing friction from our pipelines and our tools and our workflows, has been pretty exciting. It’s removed some tedium out of their jobs—and I’ve seen faster prototyping, I’ve seen faster creativity, and shorter, faster conversations around creativity and coming to alignment. And so…I think it’s super interesting. I think there’s a real rise of creativity that comes from removing some of the tedious tasks about development.”
It doesn’t sound like Miele went into specifics around what creativity was being fostered by new AI tools. Cutting down on friction sounds great, but it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump from prototyping with genAI assets to ending up with AI slop all over your game’s big reveal. There’s a lot of debate about just how much time is saved, and much less debate about how much players resoundingly hate hearing that any genAI was used in the making of their new favorite game.
Miele’s answer is of a piece with the rest of the corporate bandwagoning around AI, which is to say lots of big but vague aspirations. “We view AI as a powerful accelerator of creativity, innovation, and player connection,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson told investors last year. “Across our teams, we’re investing in new workflows and capabilities to integrate AI to enhance how we build, scale and personalize experiences. From dynamic in-game worlds to delivering authentic athlete and team likenesses at incredible scale, our developers are using AI to push the boundaries of what’s possible in design, animation and storytelling, helping us deliver deeper, more immersive gameplay.”
Does that include Star Wars Jedi 3? Mass Effect 5? We’ve already seen apparent AI slop creep its way into Battlefield 6. Unfortunately, EA has a vested interest in the AI bet panning out. It has a $55 billion leveraged sale to Saudi Arabia that might hinge in part on the controversial technology’s ability to cut costs and ramp up profits. I mean creativity.