EA Partners isn't dead, says exec

Electronic Arts Labels president Frank Gibeau understands why some people might think that the publishers' "partners" label is dead, but it isn't, he told Polygon. In late April, the company laid off nearly 1,000 people. At the time it was widely reported that the EA Partners label was significantly cut back, or closed.

Under the EA Partners label, EA has published a variety of games including Double Fine Productions' Brutal Legend, Epic Games' Bulletstorm, the Left 4 Dead and Rock Band series and the upcoming first game from Respawn Entertainment, Titanfall.

But Titanfall won't be EA Partners' last game, Gibeau said.

"I understand why you might believe that," Gibeau said when asked to verify that EAP had been shut down. "I don't think the communication of that has been particularly well executed on our part.

"We are absolutely open for business to partner with developers out there. In fact on mobile, as an example, with our Chillingo team, we just published three games this week. On the console front, honestly, when you're in a transition, you tend to focus in on your internal titles and put must of your attention there and most of your capital to make sure you get your studios positioned and configured for that. So we're definitely looking to do that."

The layoffs that impacted EAP, he said, were in part due to that temporary change of focus internally.

"We had, frankly, too much capacity inside of our EA Partners team to handle more projects than we were in position to want to have right now," he said. "That was what was the scaling back of it was.

"But Partners is open for business."