Electronic Arts will be moving away from distributing externally-developed games to focus more on its internal titles, which can generate higher margins, the company said today, and it plans to keep its headcount steady through its upcoming fiscal year. For calendar 2010, EA expects the worldwide packaged goods segment of the games industry to see a three percent drop in revenue, which it admits is a “conservative” view. To help improve the company’s overall profit …

Following the release of its fiscal third quarter results today, Electronic Arts outlined its preliminary release schedule for the coming year and beyond, including sequels to Dragon Age and Dead Space as well as a console version of The Sims 3. Both Crysis 2, externally developed by Crytek, and “The Sims 3 on Console Title,” as EA is tentatively referring to it, are due during the last calendar quarter of this year. Crysis 2, the …

[Every week, Gamasutra sums up sister iPhone site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by editor in chief Danny Cowan and authors Mathew Kumar and Jonathan Glover.] This week, FingerGaming covers Gamevil’s stylish brawler Vanquish, Ubisoft’s iPhone adaptation of Assassin’s Creed II: Discovery, and Gameloft’s Cooking Mama competitor Pocket Chef. Here are the top stories from the last seven days: – Top-Grossing Game …

Electronic Arts saw its fiscal third quarter revenue decline year over year, but at the same time shrunk its net loss from $641 million to $82 million, while reaching a company high for digital revenue. Revenue for the quarter that ended December 31 was $1.243 billion, down 24.8 percent from $1.654 billion in the same quarter of the prior year. EA says the decline was due to a number of factors including a smaller release …

Electronic Arts has its eye on the social space in a big way, moving aggressively toward digital revenue models and buying up Playfish — and it looks like one of its next moves will see the Madden NFL franchise coming to Facebook. “We have to make Madden more accessible,” EA Sports boss Peter Moore told Bloomberg. “You’ll see us on Facebook going forward.” Playfish, the social game developer EA spent $300 million to acquire late …

The editors of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra invite readers to participate in the annual Game Developer Salary Survey, the only statistical study of game industry salaries and benefits across the years. The information provided will help inform the entire game development community. Now, for the first time, the survey also includes indie and contract developers, no longer only reporting statistics for full-time employees of established companies. In separate data sets, we’ll present the earnings …

Casual game developer PlayFirst has hired Mitali Pattnaik, previously a social gaming executive at Electronic Arts, to serve as its general manager. The San Francisco-based studio, developer of games including Diner Dash and Chocolatier, says Pattnaik will drive PlayFirst’s social gaming efforts. Although PlayFirst has released games to social platforms like Facebook, it has traditionally operated mainly in the standard casual sphere of download- and portal-based games. Pattnaik’s hire marks a clearer move into the …

At the Art History of Games conference, Tale of Tales, the indie studio behind The Path, argues that “games are not art,” and “largely a waste of time.” Meanwhile, one professor examines where art and play have collided. Tale of Tales: Games “Not Art,” Largely A “Waste Of Time” Tales of Tales has never been shy about making bold statements. At The Art History of Games conference in Atlanta, GA last week, Michael Samyn and …

Free Realms, Sony Online Entertainment’s youth-targeted free-to-play PC MMO, has reached a milestone of eight million unique user registrations, the publisher announced today. Developed by SOE’s San Diego headquarters, Free Realms launched April 28 of last year, giving it an average monthly registration rate of nearly 900,000. The game is free to download and play, with an optional paid subscription conferring various bonuses, as well as in-game microtransactions. Registrations seem to have slowed somewhat since …