As articulated by @bigsocrates in their thread discussing the topic, big game developers these days are on shaky grounds, or that's at least what the leaders of those companies want you to believe. It always bear repeating that while Microsoft cut thousands of jobs and recently shuttered Arkane Austin AND Tango Gameworks, the company as a whole posted continual revenue growth as it became, at least by the metrics of some sources, the most valuable company in the world.

EA now finds itself in the same situations other big tentpole studios in the industry are in. They made game investments and some of them did not pan out and its leadership is needing to own up to that while global trends suggest that console consumers are spending less. In a report to investors, EA is now claiming that it entirely missed its Q1 financial goals. In response to that and the company's stock dropping by 2.5%, CEO Andrew Wilson authorized a new three-year stock buyback plan totaling $5 billion.

Wilson also attempted to allay investor concerns by making a few comments about reducing workloads and exploring new revenue sources that definitely raised some eyebrows. First, he made some incredibly concerning comments about the company's employed artists and developers having "a real hunger" to use generative AI to reduce their workloads. Now, when I first shared that Andrew Wilson made some questionable comments about AI on some Discords, people pointed out that middleware like Speed Tree or using stuff from the Unity or Unreal Asset store amounts to using generative AI. Likewise, Adobe autofill is an AI-oriented tool and is almost ubiquitous in its uses in gaming and generalized art creation. However, when you look at what Wilson said exactly, I think you can get why I and others have some major concerns.

In regards to the FIFA games, Wilson stated:

“But the things I talked about in the conference were really both two-fold. One, how do we get more efficient? The stat I used was we’ve moved from being able to create stadiums from 6 months to 6 weeks. And my expectation is that will continue to shrink over time.

“Maybe even more profound than that – when we build a game we have animation and run cycles. In FIFA 23, we had 36 run cycles, which gave you a kind of believability of human performance inside of that game. When we launched EA Sports FC 24, we had 1,200 run cycles.

On top of that, as reported by our sister-site, GameSpot, Wilson stated that in-game responsive advertising was definitely something he and other leaders at EA have considered, but that EA would take a "thoughtful approach." The choice quote that they reported was:

"As we think about the many, many billions of hours spent, both playing, creating, watching and connecting and where much of that engagement happens to be on the bounds of a traditional game experience, our expectation is that advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us."

"We'll be very thoughtful as we move into that, but we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences."

Why is Wilson making such a big deal about advertising in EA developed games? Because during this largely negative earnings call, he promoted the next Battlefield as being a 'tremendous live service game' that will support the largest development team in 'franchise history.' When pressed on how the company could justify making such a massive investment at a time when most in the industry are contracting, Wilson brought up the topic of in-game advertising.

Unlike Phil Spencer or Embracer, EA and Wilson have venerable money makers like Madden and FIFA. Is Wilson simply trying to divert the attention of his shareholders to prevent them from advocating from a radical course correction? Who's to say, but EA already laid off approximately 5% of its staff as part of company-wide layoffs near the start of 2023.

reducing workloads workforces. FTFY

It's worth noting a few things here. The first of these is that EA is still very much profitable. It missed analyst expectations of its revenue and earnings (though not by THAT much) but it's still very much in the black and making cash.

The second is that after cutting 1 in 20 of its employees EA is giving 5 billion dollars back to its shareholders. A small fraction of that money could have saved those people's jobs.

Setting that aside, I always find it funny when a CEO of a massive corporation says that their employees are "eager" to use some buzzword thing that's being foisted off on them. They're excited to...say whatever the CEO wants to hear!

From a consumer perspective I know that the number one thing I look for in a game is the variety of run cycles. If a game has 1200 run cycles instead of 36 that means it's 33 1/3 times better! They should charge 33 times the price too! Such value!

It's funny to me because only a CEO could think that people care about the number of run cycles and how long it takes to build a stadium. As a gamer I care about things that materially affect my experience. Little improvements in animation are nice as far as they go, but when you put out the same game every year except now there are more tiny variations in running animations I struggle to give a damn. And as an investor making stadiums quicker sounds nice in theory but what matters is cost and revenue. If stadiums take a long time then hire more people to make stadiums? Tools are fine and all but do they materially affect the actual cost of the game to make, and if so why not say that?

It's all just mathy nonsense that has the sound of being something quantifiable but in fact does not matter. Maybe generative AI will make games better and cheaper and maybe it won't but we won't know based on number of run cycles.

Meanwhjle what will matter is the advertising. Oof. I won't even watch streaming with ads. I'm sure they'll add "no in game ads" to the premium tiers or let you spend some Battlebux to get out of them, but these companies really are just moving wholesale to the mobile model, except instead of being free to play they want to charge more and more. I'm sure in game ads will become something they all patch in after launch when they have people's money, like cash shops coming in after review.

The future of high budget games is ever more tawdry and less appealing.