AI won't save EA, and probably nothing will.
The AI can't make up for years of mismanagement and greed.
The recent proclamations from EA’s CEO, Andrew Wilson, that AI is a way forward for the company is an absolute farce.
Wilson predicts that up to 60% of their development processes could be sped up by AI, and could result in 30% quicker development time. Specifically he claims that generative AI (Gen AI as he's been calling it 🙄) is a promising future for the organisation.
Wilsons example was that for their sporting games, it used to take six months to make a stadium, and now over time they have the process down to six weeks. Wilson hopes that AI can bring that further down to six days.
Who? Gaming crisis solved? Can we hire everyone back now? (Sarcasm obviously)
Let's me be clear here. AI can improve game development, but not in the ways these out of touch CEOs and wannabe AI fan boys think it will.
This claim is nothing more than attempt to convince clueless stakeholders to keep investing in the company and to distract them from the decades of poor leadership that led EA to where it is now.
Because if we take a trip down memory lane , and we will, and look at EA's long list of failures, AI couldn't have solved any of them, but in most cases better leadership could have.
Could AI have helped Anthem?
If we are going to start anywhere with EA, we are definitely going to start with Anthem, EA's 'Destiny killer' made by BioWare. A live service game that showed promise, but lacked anything of interest and life. It immediately missed all of its sales targets, was marred by a bunch of launch issues, and then EA abandoned it like a father going out to get cigarettes.
I start with Anthem, because its failure lead to Jason Schreier, an investigative journalist at Kotaku, to get the scoop and uncovered what was over a decade of issues and toxic work conditions.
In his piece, How BioWare's Anthem went wrong, Schreier paints a picture of constant struggle for the development teams, not caused by a lack of AI, but instead poor management and technical difficulties that were also caused by bad management.
The article doesn’t just outline the massive problems that made the game a failure. It outlines a decade of poor management and leadership that plagued BioWare way before they were actively developing the game.
The creative leadership was so poor on the game that they removed the jetpack elements from the game several times and changed the name of the game the day before it was announced. They simply never knew what this game was and pissed around their development teams with indecisiveness.
Brr its cold in here
The other kicker that has effected multiple EA games was the decision by leadership to force several games to use the same engine, Frostbite.
Whilst engine parity is not a bad thing necessarily, Frostbite was initially developed to be a shooter for the Battlefield games and was not supported enough internally. A decision made by EA leadership.
This caused many issues internally for games like Need for Speed, FIFA, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect Andromeda that had to invest additional development in order to make a shooter engine work for other types of games.
Not a single one of these issues would have been solved by any AI. Unless they replaced management with AI.
Thankfully in recent times EA has laxed it’s policy of forcing their studios to use Frostbite with many of their recent games, that have also been successful, using other engines.
Toxic and greedy
Let’s not forget that EAs workplace culture has been notoriously toxic.
In 2004 an anonymous letter from the wife of an employee about how poorly her husband was being treated through crunch culture started a movement known as the EA Spouses movement and began the conversation in the gaming industry about crunch culture.
Imagine being the company so bad at treating your employees, you spark a movement around employee abuse that is still going on over twenty years later. The incident in 2004 resulted in three class action lawsuits against the company.
In 2012 and 2013 the company won the consumerist rating as the “Worst Company in America”, granted EA, when they won it the first year questioned why a video game company won it over Banks, lobbyists, and the industrial war machine, however this was an award that people voted on and the recent bad press about the company and their practices with their recent games had spurred many to cast their vote. EA then went on to win the award again the following year and pledged to do better.
However, a decade on, the company still isn't viewed that positively due to their aggressive business practices in buying out studios and effectively ruining them either on purpose or through poor management, not to mention their flagrant greed with putting micro-transactions in games. Their push towards monetising their games was never done elegantly, with a lot of the failure of their Star Wars Battlefront II reboot being put down to how gamers felt about EA implementing effectively pay-to-win purchases in the game and then attempted to justify it on Reddit, which received over 600,000 downvotes making it the most downvoted thing on Reddit for a while.
Their greed with micro transactions also caught the eye of regulators in Europe who claim the company is exposing young gamers to gambling mechanics which is something that is agains the law in many territories across the world. EA fought this strongly, primarily because they make so much money from them. The Netherlands and Belgium instructed EA to turn off those features in their countries, and in the UK EA went to court claiming they were not gambling but surprise mechanics like a Kinder Surprise, another poor comment by the company that made the company the laughing stock of the industry.
EA has the games…. just not the vision
Despite having a strong collection of gaming franchises EA has successfully mismanaged a lot of them. You can't throw a rock on the internet without someone expressing a desire for EA to make another Titanfall game, however, after the disappointing sales of Titanfall 2, EA pivoted away from it. The game didn't sell poorly because It wasn't good, but because EA chose to launch Titanfall 2 within weeks of Call of Duty and their own Battlefield game, this was a move that was widely criticised across the industry, even by Titanfall's studio founder Vince Zampella. Given the games positive reviews, it's not hard to see why the game could have had the financial success EA wanted, had they chosen to launch the game at any other point in time.
EA is also guilty of purchasing game studios and ruining them, so infamous for doing so they were nicknamed the 'Evil Empire'. Of the 39 companies EA has acquired many no longer exist, and many where shut down after a single poorly released game, which I hope the reader by now understands that EA very possibly had a hand in the poor releases of those games.
Of note is BioWare, an industry darling known for making the KOTOR games, Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Since being acquired by EA the studios promise has been severely tarnished, though I will note that Schreier's story on Anthem does shed a light on many issues being present in BioWare long before they were acquired. Despite Dragon Age and Mass Effect having strong starts during BioWare's early years at EA, the last decade has not been positive for either franchise.
The fourth dragon age title has yet to come to pass and the original premise cancelled and rebooted in favour of making the game more of a live-service game. This has drawn many criticism's from the player base who expect a game like Dragon Age to be narrative single player RPG and push back against EA's attempts to make everything into a micro-transaction heavy revenue stream. Whilst live service games are not inherently bad, not all games need to be live service and it's hard to look past EA's greed. The original cancelled Dragon Age project was considered to be on track and a very promising game, however many of the teams staff where pulled away onto Mass Effect Andromeda, and Anthem and some key staff left. The game was rebooted and this time has an intended launch date, however is seen as an inferior product of a game we never got being advertised as being largely online using some of the cancelled projects work.
Despite the mishaps with Mass Effect 3's endings the trilogy is still considered a must play and loved by all. However, BioWare's attempt at a fourth game, considered a spin off, fell flat, with the game receiving many titles for the most disappointing game of the year, not to mention it was marred with a plethora of bugs on launch. To make matters worse, EA abandoned the game meaning missing content that was crucial to the games core narrative never arrived, leaving many with a bad taste in their mouth and warning newer players not to bother playing an incomplete game. BioWare has returned to the safety of the original trilogy announcing that another game in the 'Sheppard' universe of the game is coming. However, given EA's recent track record and desire to turn everything into a live-service game, this writer isn't holding out hope for a return to a great Mass Effect RPG.
Stark….wars
Finally, because I really could list out all of EA's failures for another fifty thousand words, the most egregious of EA's failures in vision and management comes from their partnership with Star Wars. EA was original given exclusivity to make Star Wars games which resulted in two disappointing Battlefront reboots and finally a success with Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order just as the exclusivity came up. Along that decade there have been a plethora of cash grabby mobile titles and a slew of cancelled Star Wars games, leading to Disney not renewing the exclusivity for EA and allowing other studios to be able to make Star Wars games. It's no small feat of incompetence that EA took one of the world's biggest franchises and a ten year exclusivity and did almost nothing of note with it.
Whilst EA does continue to make games people like and do well, EA also has a closet filled with failures that time and time again point the finger at creative mismanagement or overbearing greed by those who hold the purse strings.
As the gaming industry buckles under its own greed, it's hard to see EA doing well in the coming years as their reputation continues to alienate players and developers alike.
Even if we had a ten year leap in AI tomorrow and games development really could be fast tracked in a responsible and effective way, I still don't see how EA would get out of the hole they have dug themselves, its not the technology per se (well Frostbite doesn't help) but the leadership at EA that has repeatedly been the thing holding them back from achieving the greatness they aim for.