A character artist works on the new ‘EA Sports College Football 25.’ PHOTO: EA SPORTS

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.

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To release the college-football game this month, EA relied on artificial-intelligence technology it began developing about four years ago, before the NCAA set a new policy allowing players to sell their likeness rights in 2021 amid high-profile litigation and state legislation.

“It was a leap of faith” that the NCAA would change its rules, said Cam Weber, president of EA Sports. 

EA collected photos of the athletes’ heads from their schools and then used its AI to create their videogame doppelgängers in seconds. The technology isn’t generative AI that creates new images such as OpenAI’s Dall-E, but rather a kind that takes data from photos and creates full 3-D avatars.

If the results weren’t up to snuff, artists were brought in to make enhancements. Their changes were then fed back into the AI program so it could learn from its mistakes.

The digital versions aren’t as detailed as in Madden, but they mark the first time EA has been able to put replicas of real players in its college football game.

“You couldn’t do this with the regular workflows we’ve done in the past,” Weber said. 

Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers, one of the players on the cover of ‘EA Sports College Football 25,’ as he appears in the game. PHOTO: EA SPORTS

For the 134 college football stadiums in the game, EA used other technology it developed in-house to incorporate details such as Notre Dame’s “Touchdown Jesus” mural and the waterfalls at Arkansas State. 

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.

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. 

Questions arose in the collegiate football community about how EA would compensate players and whether stars would get paid more. 

The company ended up offering players $600 each, plus a deluxe copy of the game that retails for $99.99 and comes with extra content. An EA spokesman said more players opted in than the company was able to fit into the game.

An image from EA Sports’ new college-football videogame, which has gotten mostly positive reviews from gamers who paid for early access. PHOTO: EA SPORTS

Some stars are getting more money, however, in exchange for extra work. They include Michigan Wolverines running back Donovan Edwards, Texas Longhorns quarterback Quinn Ewers and Colorado Buffaloes cornerback and wide receiver Travis Hunter, who are on the cover of the game, and more than 100 players who agreed to promote “EA Sports College Football 25” on social media. 

That cost, which adds up to more than $7.7 million, is notable but not huge for a game that will likely cost at least $40 million to make and tens of millions of dollars more to market, according to analysts.

Competition with Madden

“EA Sports College Football 25” is coming out at a time when the videogame industry is in a funk. It has been beset by layoffs this year, and publishers have been releasing fewer big-budget, visually complex titles—so-called triple-A games—which typically sell the most copies. U.S. videogame software sales fell 3% in May, according to the most recent monthly data available from market-research firm Circana.

The lack of competition and the long delay since EA last put out a college-football game should help fuel demand for the new one, said Oppenheimer analyst Martin Yang. He estimates it will sell at least four million units, translating to more than $240 million in sales. 

The version of the game that came out in 2013, called “NCAA Football,” had a devoted following but was never as popular as EA’s Madden NFL series. 

This year, college football returning to videogames with real players for the first time could dent demand for August’s “Madden NFL 25,” Yang said. The annual Madden sequels are typically among EA’s bestselling games. 

To address that potential problem, EA is selling the deluxe editions of both games in a bundle for $149.99, or $50 less than buying them separately. The standard format costs $69.99.

So far, social-media reactions to the game from people who paid for early access appear to be mostly positive. However, many complained about problems trying to play the game online.

“Man I sure wish I could play #NCAA25 without EA’s fragile servers dying,” an X user wrote Monday. 

EA said it is increasing server capacity to try to address the problem.

The company is also hoping some small details created without the help of AI will help engage fans. To make an in-game version of the University of Texas mascot, a live bull named Bevo, developers used motion-capture technology on a colleague who ran on all fours.