EA filed a patent and published a research paper for an AI matchmaking system that pairs players not just by skill, but by their predicted likelihood of quitting the game — potentially also by their likelihood of spending money. EA has never publicly confirmed which games, if any, use this system.

Patent US20170259178A1 was filed in March 2016. The accompanying academic paper, presented at the World Wide Web conference in 2017 and co-authored by EA researchers, analyzed 36.9 million matches from 1.68 million unique players. The paper explicitly states the system's objective function can be changed to optimize for metrics including play time, retention, or player spending. Critics noted this raised the possibility the system could be tuned to influence microtransaction revenue. EA has not confirmed active deployment in any specific title.