After 11 years, Electronic Arts (EA) has released a college football game that uses photos and AI to bring 11,000 real players into the game.
The Madden NFL franchise that EA is well-known for makes 3D scans of each pro football player. However, there are roughly six times the amount of players in the NCAA Division I as there are in the NFL.
Scanning 11,000 college football players is not financially or logistically possible. So, the developers had to find a more efficient and less expensive option.
Headshots and AI
The company turned to football players’ headshots taken by their colleges (and with the players’ permission) and combined them with an AI model to make a virtual representation of each player. It’s not clear if the photographers gave permission or were compensated, PetaPixel has reached out to EA for clarification.
EA has been developing this model for four years and it still requires fine-tuning. Sometimes the AI would produce an unusable video game character which meant EA would adjust the photos and data being fed to the AI model until they got what they were looking for.
Of course, it means that the players in the college football game are not as detailed as the ones in the Madden series but at least it provides more realism in the game leading to a better experience for players.
Now that this technology is up and running, EA hopes it will lay the groundwork for future releases of the game. Football games are released annually partly because teams change every season so fans can play the same version of the team that is going out on the field for real.
As noted by Tech Radar, this technology may also help for other sporting games like hockey and motorsport.
Legal Wrangling
The reason for the 11-year hiatus is because of a class-action lawsuit over likeness rights.
Essentially, these lawsuits argued that the use of player likenesses in video games without compensation violated their rights. In 2013, EA and the Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC) settled these lawsuits for $40 million.
But in that time, the NCAA changed its policy and now each player in the game will be compensated at least $600 and will receive a deluxe copy of the game. That’s over $6 million dollars.
Image credits: Electronic Arts.