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This year’s EA Investor Day was as much about the next Battlefield, The Sims, and EA Sports FC as it was about artificial intelligence.
Every other sentence was something artificial, something intelligence, so much so that Mihir Vaidya, chief strategy officer, invited ‘Jude Bellingham’ onstage to talk about what it’s like playing football at the Bernabéu. An AI version of Bellingham, I should add.
This appearance was far from the strangest shiny toy on show. That award goes to EA’s Project Air, a new kind of “social ecosystem,” still focused on friends and community, but now powered by AI avatars. Where once you could spend hours in a character creator perfectly sculpting your ideal brute, now it’s all about doing it with a simple text prompt.
You can then interact with these characters – “almost like a game” as Vaidya suggests – before publishing them for others to interact with. It sounds suspiciously like EA is toying with its own version of a metaverse; how long until we see loot-boxes, in-game adverts (that’s a given), and a day one DLC giving you the legal right to own your AI likeness?
The urge for tech companies to make something AI isn’t a new phenomena. But the weirdest part of the whole presentation was Vaidya’s choice of character, Ace Desai; “legendary investor,” and absolutely not a cheeky sniff of investor buttock.
This isn’t the first time that EA has teased its dream of a metaverse. Towards the start of the year, Andrew Wilson answered a question from investors “about ‘taking all of your siloed sport communities and thinking about a way to bring them all together’ to ‘just sort of create, for lack of a better word, a metaverse?'” as reported by IGN.
The EA chief executive officer responded chirpily. “We do believe we have a meaningful opportunity over the coming years to harness the power of that community both inside and outside of our games,” he said.
The interaction between the user and legendary investor is pretty limited, though the technical showcase of Jude Bellingham’s likeness in EA Sports FC had a little more fidelity and flair. There are some obvious differences between Project Air and EA’s earlier tease of a ‘metaverse’, though there’s definitely a feeling that the technology is all pointed in a clear direction – the integration of artificial intelligence and augmented reality.
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