Less than a month after Electronic Arts announced that is being acquired by an investor consortium comprised of PIF (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund), Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, reports are now coming up of the company’s employees being urged to make use of AI for “just about everything”. According to Business Insider, a number of EA staff members spoke about this under condition of anonymity.
It is worth noting that EA leadership asking employees to use AI has been happening for around a year – well before the company announced its acquisition. The leadership has been asking employees to use AI for quite a few things, from generating code while programming a game all the way to using it to generate concept art. Even middle managers have been asked to use AI tools to get advise on how they can talk to the workers under them about subjects like promotions.
To accomplish this, the company has been asking employees to undergo multiple training courses about AI, with subjects including how AI-based tools can be used to accelerate work, and how generative AI can be used as a “thought partner” according to internal documents acquired by Business Insider. There are a few tools available to employees for this, including an in-house chatbot named ReefGPT. However, employees have also noted that these tools have been producing “flawed code and other so-called hallucinations” that they then have to spend more time to correct.
One of the employees – laid off earlier this year and formerly a part of the Respawn Entertainment QA team – spoke about being let go because these AI tools were able to review and summarise feedback gotten from playtesters. This, he noted, was a likely reason that he was a part of the lay-offs, which affected around 100 Respawn Entertainment employees.
Rumours started coming up shortly after the acquisition was announced that EA would be looking at streamlining its game development process by making use of AI based tools. These AI tools are expected to fulfil quite a few parts of the company’s game development pipelines, which might also end up resulting in lay-offs as are often seen when streamlining processes are implemented.
Considering the amount of debt that EA has taken on to itself to fund its acquisition, this focus on employees using AI likely stems from the company planning further cutbacks to its workforce down the line. Analysts have also been predicting that the company will likely start focusing on games it believes to be surefire hits in order to guarantee higher revenue. Kantan Games analyst Serkan Toto believes that it will lead to “an even stronger focus on evergreen IPs, blockbuster (fewer but potentially bigger games) and live services – at the expense of riskier projects, new ideas and innovation.”
New York University Stern School of Business professor and industry researcher Joost Van Dreunen spoke about the possibility of the company doubling down on its sports franchises, which make up for a large percentage of its earnings. He also called into question the valuation of EA as part of the $55 billion buyout, noting that the company has “little growth potential” to justify the value.
