EA kills off mysterious Blueprint division

Blueprint was never officially acknowledged by EA, but former employees of the division have spilled the beans to Variety. The site claims: “Some people called it a project, some a division, others just a collection of games, but whatever it was, EA never officially announced it.

“Blueprint was intended to be a new way to develop fresh properties across multiple media. In fact, it was originally called Transmedia internally before adopting the name Blueprint.

“In addition to its charter to work on new stuff, Blueprint also got ownership of several existing projects at EA, most notably the three games being developed by Steven Spielberg.

“It seems there were around a dozen people working on Blueprint and their mission was to change the development process so that individuals or small teams could work together from disparate locations without necessarily being employed at an EA studio.

“The Blueprint model is also being used on a previously undisclosed, but none-too-surprising project – Boom Blox 2. Apparently work is already underway on a sequel to the spring's innovative Wii puzzle game, which got very good reviews and sold decently.

“With the most recent round of layoffs, the last employees working for Blueprint were let go and Castle segued to a new role at EALA. The division was never officially killed. Its games are still ongoing. But with nobody working for Blueprint anymore, it simply doesn't exist.”

The news comes not long after the departure of EA’s Casual boss Kathy Vrabeck and the merging of the EA Casual and The Sims labels. However, many voices at EA still see casual as a key sector for firm, with industry legend Peter Moore recently bigging up the firm’s casual ambitions.