Anonymous sources close to EA Partners, the publishing arm of EA Games that worked with external developers including Valve, for the likes of Orange Box, Portal 2 and a host of other companies, are hinting at its impending closure, following on from a rough financial year and trouble with several high profile titles.

Some of the big money sinks included Kingdom of Amalur: The Reckoning and APB, though apparently even big name games like Crysis 3 didn't meet sales expectations.

Insomniac's upcoming game won't be affected by the closure

The whole idea behind EA Partners, was for the long time publisher to leverage its skills in that area to help promote games from external studios, without the need for a costly developmental team in-house. The staff was kept quite lean, allowing for them to move from project to project without much downtime. Despite this though, it seems either the big games aren't paying off the dividends they once were, or that EA Partners got a little to thick around the middle to justify its existence as part of EA's global entity.

If you're worried however that Respawn's unnamed first person shooter or Insomniac's Fuse might be affected, never fear, as they will continue publication as planned.

KitGuru Says: Ultimately this could just be a cost cutting measure, with EA struggling at the moment in the PR department and no doubt financially, with games like SimCity garnering more negative praise than sales. 

[Cheers GameInformer]

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