Major games publisher EA has announced a partnership with Stability AI, the developer of the Stable Diffusion generative AI software. This comes after the announcement of a buyout from Silver Lake, Affinity Partners and the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund that will leave the publisher in $20 billion of debt come Q1 2027.
Electronic Arts is one of the best-known companies in video games, with over 40 years of history and numerous major franchises in their portfolio. Their sports series like Madden and EAFC continue to top the best-selling charts annually and Split Fiction is one of this year’s most acclaimed new games.
Despite their high sales and high user counts, investors have not been satisfied; the company’s income was down by $79 million as of the Q1 2025 report, which has led to this leveraged buyout that will leave them bearing the brunt of $20 billion of debt in the near future. As such, cost-cutting measures like this AI partnership don’t come as a surprise.
In the press release put out by Stability AI, they outline their plan to “co-develop transformative generative AI models, tools, and workflows […] to reimagine how games are made.” This is far from the first time a game publisher has partnered with AI—just this week, Korean publisher Krafton pivoted to an “AI-first” approach—which will all only be to the detriment of their output in the coming years.
