Speaking at this year’s Investment Summit, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that generative artificial intelligence is “the core of our business.” Coincidentally, this bold stance comes nearly three years after he spoke about the importance of NFTs to the future of the video game industry. Indeed, a pioneer in brave and exciting technology.
Wilson’s announcement about artificial intelligence also comes at an interesting time for technology investing, when the development of artificial intelligence has led to a market boom in the entire video game industry and beyond. However, EA must know that investors can’t wait for AI-enhanced companies to show their winning hand, especially since AI giants like OpenAI could lose around $5 billion this year, according to analysts. That’s why EA and Wilson introduced Carton.
Manage cookie settings
The “From Imagination to Creation” concept demo the publisher showed investors featured peak E3-era player narration, a randomly generated cardboard box maze and the use of one of a variety of weapons drawn from EA-owned video game IP. Universal community design roles. The two players then run around throwing grenades at each other, shooting boxes, and having a good old time before the two “make it even more epic” by generating a large cardboard pyramid.
EA chief strategy officer Mihir Vaidya explained that the video is an illustration, not an actual game. He then goes into detail about how technically impressive this purely illustrative demo is, how players can create worlds in seconds, how assets from other EA games can be pulled from a shared asset database, and how this can be done in just a few seconds seconds. But remember, this is purely illustrative. It’s pure smoke and mirrors that’s technically impressive and clearly worth the investment.
Manage cookie settings
Unfortunately, these types of expository videos do little to convey the real dilemma. For example, allow me to pull out one. Moving assets from one engine to another is quite difficult – they often use completely different programming languages. In the film, we see characters from Apex Legends and a plasma cutter from Dead Space. Apex Legends was created on the Source engine, while Dead Space Remastered is a Frostbite game. Will EA let teams manually port assets to a single game engine? Or will companies harness the unlimited power of generative artificial intelligence to achieve this goal? If the latter, will the company ensure that the details of these resulting assets are correct? How will weapons be balanced? Obviously, all questions have no answers.
Those of you who are old enough or have been following the crypto/NFT craze a few years ago know what this is. EA hopes to bring in a new wave of cash for future projects, which is sweet talk for investors. Will the money actually be used for artificial intelligence projects? perhaps! Will they see the light of day? Who knows! EA has never released any NFT games or NFT integrations with its popular games – it announced a partnership with Nike for the Swoosh NFT. Of course, there hasn’t been any news since the announcement.
But looking at Electronic Arts’ stock price, it’s clear why this approach is attractive. The company is up nearly 7% year to date. That’s a lot of money, and a lot of that growth comes from following trends and keeping up with hot investment targets. This may seem weird or disgusting to me or you, but that’s why EA holds these official investor summits.
But yes, AI friends. Either we’ll see the fruits of it in the next few years, or it will fail as the hot technology now steps into the spotlight. It’s a big day for carton fans.
