"I understand why you might believe that," said EA Labels president Frank Gibeau about whether the Partners program had been closed. "I don't think the communication of that has been particularly well executed on our part."

Gibeau says that job cuts in the EA Partners team were due to there being more staff than there were projects, and that EA was focusing on internal development during the transition to Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

"We are absolutely open for business to partner with developers out there," said Gibeau. "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 most 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."

"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," he concluded.

Over the past few years EA Partners has published titles such as Left 4 Dead, Portal 2, Bulletstorm, Shadows of the Damned, Crysis, the Rock Band series, Brutal Legend, and ill-fated MMO APB.

Insomniac's will be published under the label.