EA Sports Used AI to Clone John Buccigross' Voice for NHL 27 Commentary With No Steam Disclosure

By CriticalPixel · 2026-09-08

NHL 27 has been out for less than a week on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and it is already generating conversation that has nothing to do with faceoffs or one timers. Veteran ESPN broadcaster John Buccigross, who joined the in game commentary booth for this year's release, revealed on the Chirping Zebras podcast that EA Sports used generative AI to simulate his voice for some of the broadcast lines players hear during games. EA never flagged the tool publicly before launch. The admission came from Buccigross himself, in a podcast clip, not from any EA announcement.

According to GameSpot's report on the podcast appearance, developers played AI generated lines back for Buccigross during production, and he described the results as pretty good. His reaction to the technology was blunt about what it means for his own workload: if it means less work and the same paycheck, he said, he will take it. The catch is that the AI voice does not always land on hockey vernacular. Buccigross recalled a clip where the system had him saying the crowd gets out of their chairs instead of seats, a small but telling error that a human had to manually correct before the line could ship in the finished game.

NHL 27 Deluxe Edition cover art showing a hockey player skating out under blue arena lights

No Steam Listing, No AI Disclosure

IGN's report on the story adds an important wrinkle. NHL 27 never received a Steam release, so it falls outside the disclosure rules that storefront now applies to AI generated content. This year's College Football, Madden, and FC titles all carry a label on their Steam pages warning players about generative AI use during development. NHL 27 has no equivalent notice anywhere, on console packaging or on any digital storefront, because there was no platform forcing the issue. That gap is exactly why Buccigross' podcast comments became the primary way players learned the commentary booth had been touched by AI at all, rather than a disclosure EA chose to make on its own.

NHL 27's Deluxe Edition already unlocked early access ahead of the wider launch, according to EA Sports' own NHL 27 product page, while the standard edition follows on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on September 11. Buccigross' comments landed squarely inside that launch window, which meant the story reached players while the AI voiced lines were still fresh in their headsets rather than months after release when nobody was paying attention anymore.

EA's Widening AI Playbook

NHL 27 is not the first EA Sports release built with generative tools. EA previously leaned on AI to help develop College Football, and the publisher has said that series would not have turned out as good without it. CEO Andrew Wilson has been one of the more outspoken AI boosters in the games industry, telling investors that an internal study found 60 percent of EA's development processes have high feasibility for AI improvement. Wilson pointed to stadium creation as his favorite example, saying a process that used to take six months now takes six weeks, and could eventually shrink to six days. His publicly stated goal is a 30 percent efficiency gain across EA's entire development pipeline, AI assisted voice work included.

The timing matters here too. EA was recently taken private by an investor consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, a deal that loaded the company with billions of dollars in new debt. Employees and analysts widely expect that debt to translate into layoffs, studio closures, or canceled projects, even though EA has not confirmed any specific restructuring plan yet. Leaning harder on generative AI for tasks like commentary voiceover fits neatly into that cost cutting picture, whether or not cost cutting was the explicit reason NHL 27's booth got the AI treatment.

Mixed Reaction From Players

Reaction under IGN's post on X split roughly down the middle rather than turning into a pile on. Some players said the commentary sounds noticeably worse this year, with one fan singling out repetitive lines like and he opens his account as what they called AI slop that sounds ridiculous. Others pushed back, arguing the AI voice work is a non issue compared to the real problem: EA has not meaningfully grown NHL's development budget in years, and cloned lines are a symptom of that stagnation rather than the actual disease. A few replies veered into complaints about the franchise's price and its yearly release cadence, unrelated to the AI question specifically, which is its own long running fan grievance.

EA is not operating in a vacuum here. The wider industry has faced real backlash when AI use gets sloppy in public facing ways. Activision drew criticism last year after fans spotted AI generated cosmetic items in Call of Duty Black Ops 6, including a widely mocked zombie Santa loading screen, and the publisher eventually admitted to using generative AI for some of that content. EA has, at least publicly, tried to frame its own AI usage as a quality upgrade rather than a corner cut, and Buccigross' enthusiastic quotes support that framing for now.

The CriticalPixel Take

Cloning a real broadcaster's voice with AI and shipping it without telling anyone is the kind of decision that chips away at trust in a franchise that already gets called out every year for feeling like little more than a roster update. IGN's own review landed at a 6 out of 10 and noted nothing truly substantial changed in NHL 27 outside small stadium and music tweaks. Sliding AI voice work into the broadcast booth quietly, on a full price release, is a bad look regardless of how convincing the tech sounds in a podcast clip. Buccigross is fine with the arrangement because it means less work for the same paycheck, but players did not sign up to be the test group for EA's voice cloning pipeline, especially with zero disclosure anywhere in the box or on a console store listing.

EA has not yet responded to IGN's request for comment on how far the AI voiceover work extends beyond Buccigross' lines, or whether the same approach shows up in other EA Sports titles going forward. Given Wilson's public enthusiasm for cutting development timelines with generative tools, NHL 27 is unlikely to be the last EA game where this conversation comes up.