EA Sports College Football 25 is EA’s first college football game in eleven years, but the series’ return may be a little tainted. It’s been revealed that the 150 stadiums and 11,000+ players in College Football 25 were all created with the use of AI.
EA’s latest quarterly earning call underlines that College Football 25 is doing extremely well for the company, even with Madden NFL 25 just around the corner. However, as spotted by Kotaku, it contains the unsettling revelation that the game made major use of AI.
In the call, CEO Andrew Wilson states that the game’s “..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.”
Related: Best Offensive Playbook in EA Sports College Football 25
EA’s teams did have to develop each player’s likeness (and presumably make sure they didn’t have one huge eyeball). Wilson does add that “Our very talented artists would… touch up and enhance those heads versus having to go through the full head development programs.”
AI generation is horrendously murky. It’s not a magic machine; it’s generally trained on real art/models, sometimes without attribution or permission of the original artists. Wilson didn’t disclose which models were used or what data it employed, but EA’s deal with the NFL was the impetus for switching to AI generation. “As we were launching… with the world’s largest single sport NIL deal, where image was a really important part of the process, getting 11,000 star heads into the game was a top priority for us.”
The NFL deal was announced in 2023, so it seems likely the company has had AI in mind for EA Sports College Football 25 for a while. EA has brought up the possibilities of AI in previous financials, but given the company laid off 5% of its workforce earlier this year, around 600 jobs, it’s not a great look.