EA announced that EA Games will be renamed EA Entertainment in a move that splits it and EA Sports into two separate organizations encompassing many of EA's major studios.
The cynical side of me says they're doing this to sell one of the halves off to one of the other publishers. The optimist in me hopes this leads to one more publisher in this space; we sorely need less consolidation.
That's my thought as well -- the licensed sports game market is probably more reliable (and generates more revenue vs. development cost) than originals, and they can "streamline" their business by splitting the originals business off for a sale. Not including sports probably makes the originals side more attractive to platform holders, as most sports games probably include provisions that require multiplatform releases (see also: the MLB signing a publishing deal for Sony's "The Show" on non-Sony platforms).
EA can barely release a quality game as is, I cant see how splitting their knowledge is going to help them much. Unfortunately they’ve been benefitting from previously good franchise games scoring them bulk preorder monies