AI: Video Game Assembly gets Speed & Scale. RTZ #425
… rapid ramping of Gaming Content is low-hanging fruit
I discussed the possibilities of AI ‘Digital Twins’ recently, especially with rapid progress in AI likeness rights. We’re now seeing an interesting application in Video Games.
While we all see how this AI Tech Wave will impact enterprises and consumers, and countless verticals from healthcare to education to retail and beyond, one company in one vertical, video games, is showing what’s possible already. The WSJ explains in “How AI Brought 11,000 College Football Players to Digital Life in Three Months”:
“Electronic Arts used new tech to scan photos for its videogame after securing players’ likeness rights for the first time.”
“It has been over a decade since Electronic Arts EA -4.31%decrease; red down pointing triangle released a college football videogame. To get the likenesses of some 11,000 players into the new version that launched Friday, it had three months.”
“For its long-running Madden NFL series, EA developers travel the country to make three-dimensional scans of professional players. But that wasn’t financially or logistically feasible for “EA Sports College Football 25.”
“There are about six times as many players in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision as there are in the National Football League. In addition, colleges don’t set their rosters until the late spring and they often change significantly, as some players go pro and others matriculate.”
It wouldn’t have been possible without the legal deals for ‘AI Rights’ of player likenesses that were negotiated recently. A topic I’ve discussed for broader media and hollywood industry verticals.
“Securing likeness rights”
“In 2013, EA canceled its old college football game in the aftermath of a class-action lawsuit involving its use of a college basketball player’s likeness in another one of its sports titles.”
“In early 2021, anticipating the NCAA would set its new likeness rules later that year, EA announced plans to reboot its college-football franchise — and with a major upgrade.”
“Previously, the games featured generic college players, because EA didn’t have a way to secure the rights to real ones. Now the company wanted to include real players for the first time.”
Needed ‘Show me the Money’ deals to make it possible.
And the scale of the project in terms of numbers of players, and individuall data items to be tracked per player is pretty impressive:
“The project was so large that the team reached the maximum number of cells possible on a Google Sheets spreadsheet — 10 million — while trying to keep track of all the data it collected.”
“All these things are meaningful” to fans, said Robert Jones, a senior production director at EA.”
“Weber said EA sees long-term value in its AI technology because the company plans to release new installments of the college game annually. In addition, some of the athletes are likely to become part of its Madden NFL series in the future, which could potentially make their 3-D avatars continually useful.”
“The company also hopes to use the technology for its other sports titles, which span soccer, auto-racing, hockey and mixed-martial arts.”
The whole piece is worth going through as it offers broad and deep look at how it takes both legal rights negotiations and rapidly scaling AI technologies to do in months what it took years. And these types of tasks are the low hanging fruit in this vertical.
But it provides a mini road map that countless other verticals will follow, to slowly and surely leverage AI technologies and user Trust to do far more useful things, at speeds and scale not possible until this AI Tech Wave. Stay tuned.
(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)
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