EA Is Pushing Hard for Generative AI in Game Development

Generative AI is gradually moving at Electronic Arts from the experimental stage into everyday game development. According to current and former employees, company leadership strongly supports its use and is making it clear to developers that it is a technology they will need to reckon with in the future.

According to a report by Vertical Slice, generative AI is being “heavily pushed” at EA, although its use is not yet mandatory. One employee says they keep hearing the same message from managers: “This is the future, you have to adapt.” The company is actively testing various generative tools and looking for ways to integrate them into production workflows.

Not all employees view this direction positively, however. The push to use AI comes at a time when the game industry, including EA, is undergoing layoffs and restructuring. Some developers are therefore concerned that AI will not only be used to speed up work, but also to further shrink teams. According to one source, employees have the impression that leadership is trying to find out how few people it takes to keep making big games.

EA has long presented artificial intelligence as one of the technologies that could significantly change how games are made. The company sees it as a tool that can speed up content creation, prototyping, and other parts of development. Current employee accounts, however, suggest that these are not just distant plans, but a direction that is beginning to gain traction within development teams.

Other major companies are heading in the same direction

EA is not the only major gaming company gradually integrating generative AI into development. Ubisoft is accelerating its AI investments and testing the technology for NPCs, dialogue, game worlds, and internal tools; Take-Two says it has hundreds of AI pilots and implementations across the company; Sony uses it for programming, QA, 3D modeling, and animation; and Microsoft is developing its own generative models and tools for game creation. Square Enix wants to make greater use of AI for QA and debugging, Capcom uses it for routine development tasks, Krafton even describes itself as an “AI First company,” and Tencent uses it for NPCs, animation, 3D creation, and automated testing. Generative AI is gradually becoming a standard part of development across much of the AAA games industry, although companies differ considerably in how aggressively they are adopting it and what they intend to use it for.

Generative AI is gradually shifting from an auxiliary experiment to a standard work tool at major game companies.

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