Electronic Arts chief financial officer Eric Brown has resigned from his position at the company, according to a Gamasutra report. Brown will officially exit the company on Friday, February 17. On Tuesday, February 21 he will take on the role of CFO and COO of communications company Polycom. EA's current chief accounting officer and senior vice president, Kenneth Barker, will serve as interim CFO.

Electronic Arts has confirmed that it has laid off a number of its staff at EA Canada. The company would not disclose just how many employees were affected by the layoffs. The cuts are part of a restructuring plan at the Vancouver office and its studio in nearby Burnaby. That studio is responsible for the development of such titles as Need For Speed: The Run and FIFA 12.

Electronic Arts announced that Remedy Entertainment, Focus Home Interactive, Iceberg Interactive, Strategy First, Macro Games, Selectsoft, and Legendo Entertainment have signed on to sell their games via the Origin digital distribution platform. Remedy's first title to be available on the platform will be Alan Wake.

As part of its earnings announcements today, Electronic Arts revealed that its digital games service Origin generated around $100 million in the 2011 calendar year from an estimated 9.3 million consumers.

The company also said that its MMO (created by BioWare) Star Wars: The Old Republic currently enjoys about 1.7 million active subscribers since launching in December, with 2 million units sold.

Speaking to Eurogamer, EA Partners executive producer Jeff Gamon says that it will not use an Online Pass or code system for the upcoming Syndicate game. This is obviously great news for consumers who absolutely loathe this new practice by publishers such as EA, THQ, and Ubisoft.

Gamon said that EA decided to leave Online Pass out of the re-imagining of the dystopian Bullfrog strategy game classic to appeal to more players.

As we reported last week, a petition at Change.org is asking Electronic Arts to publicly come out against SOPA.  The number of signatures now sits north of 135,000.

A new petition on Change.org, which already has over 1,800 signatures, is asking Electronic Arts to publicly come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act. The petition was created by New York University student and gamer Shashank Kasturirangan. The petition is directed at Tammy Levine - VP of Worldwide PR, Joel Linzner VP of Business and Legal Affairs, EA CEO John Riccitiello, and SVP of Corporate Communications Jeff Brown.

After licensing talks broke down between Textron - the parent company of Bell Helicopter – and Electronics Arts, the company has decided to take the legal route to get around paying any licensing fees. Publishers are often pretty heavy handed when it comes to depictions of their work – even when the target claims fair use - but when the shoe is on the other foot, EA has a habit of seeking remedies through the court.

It looks like Nintendo, Sony, and Electronic Arts have withdrawn their support for the much maligned SOPA bill.  An update to the government’s list of SOPA supporters (PDF) no longer sports the companies’ names (although Sony’s music divisions are still on there).

Why the change of heart?  We’re not sure.

According to Electronic Arts over a million gamers worldwide celebrated the holidays in front of their PCs playing BioWare's MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Over the weekend, players spent over 5.5 million hours playing the game, according to EA.

SWTOR has hit a number of other milestones in the first week of release, according to EA:

According to a 70+ page thread on the Star Wars: The Old Republic forums, a number of consumers have found that their copy did not contain an game activation code in the box. This seems to be isolated to some of the rather pricier $150 Collector's Editions of the game.

A California Superior Court judge has told EA that it must defend itself in the $400 million contract-interference suit brought by Activision over Infinity Ward founders Jason West and Vince Zampella.

For those of you still waiting to get into Star Wars: The Old Republic - a privilege you earned by pre-ordering the game, we might add - BioWare offers some good news: they are offering a two-day grace period for Star Wars: The Old Republic customers. The move is meant to reward fans who pre-ordered but have yet to get early access to the game. They are concerned about getting it in time for the December 20 launch of the game.

If you wanted to avoid using Origin to update Battlefield 3, you can forget about that. Electronic Arts, responding to an inquiry about it from Aus Gamers said that stand-alone update files will not be released and the only way to update the game is through its Origin platform. This makes sense given that much of EA's falling out with Steam was over having more control of deploying updates and content directly to customers.

According to EA's Peter Moore Battlefield has either taken market share from Modern Warfare 3, has added millions of new customers into the mix, or both. The COO of EA insists that Battlefield 3 has successfully taken a slice of Modern Warfare 3’s market share, even though the latest title in Activision's top franchise has become the fastest selling entertainment product of all time.

According to internal sales figures revealed by EA's CFO Eric Brown, Battlefield 3 has managed to sell 8 million copies of the 12 million it has shipped worldwide on various platforms including the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.

Speaking at the Baird Technology Conference in San Francisco, Brown highlighted the game's sales numbers a month after the game launched. The game managed to sell five million copies in the first week of its release. EA Hopes that the game will see further sales during the holiday shopping season.

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick takes a jab at EA, saying at the recent Reuters Media Summit that it will be LucasArts - and not Electronic Arts - that makes out like a bandit when MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic is released. At least he admits that the Star Wars-themed MMORPG will be successful.

After first offering DLC early to customers and then being threatened with a class action lawsuit, EA has decided it will now honor its E3 promises to give Battlefield 3 customers a digital copy of Battlefield 1943. Last week during the holidays, the company said that the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding and that they would now give North American and European customers what they wanted in the first place. The company posted the following message on its support web site:

We predicted this would happen when we reported on it a week or so ago: a group of Battlefield 3 PS3 owners have gotten together to sue Electronic Arts for not delivering on its promise to give them a free copy of Battlefield 1943. At E3 earlier this year EA promised that the PS3 version of the game would include a code for its online-only game Battlefield 3. When consumers bought the game, they found that there was no code for the game - and EA really didn't have an explanation as to why.

Electronic Arts claims that it is formulating on "more equitable" rules in the wake of numerous bans from its forums that have locked some users out of games on its Origin service. The Escapist does a nice job chronicling the events that really began this problem back in March, when a mouthy BioWare Social Network user earned a 72 hour ban in the forums and found that he had also been locked out of Dragon Age 2 - a game he paid money for.

According to a report on UGO's Wii channel, Nintendo may use EA's Origin service with its upcoming Wii U console. According to an anonymous tip from within EA, the company is supposedly working with Nintendo on a deal related to the Origin digital distribution platform. The source claims that EA and Nintendo are in talks to use Origin as Nintendo’s primary hosting platform for game distribution online.

The source also claims that Valve has been talking with Nintendo, but the impression they give is that EA is being extra aggressive in sealing the deal.

You might want to sit down for this.

There’s a popular war video game out there that not only allows players to shoot hundreds upon hundreds of human characters but it also features the horrific and brutal snuffing out of a small and innocent life.

Yes, in Electronic Arts’ recently released Battlefield 3, players can kill a virtual rat.

If the fight between EA's Battlefield 3 and the Call of Duty series is a popularity contest than EA is losing, according to online usage stats released by Xbox Live's Major Nelson. According to his list of most popular game being online for the week, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 are more popular than Battlefield 3. This might give EA some pause considering that these are very old games beating a game just barely released this month.

Electronic Arts is denying claims from German gamers and the press that its download service Origin spies on users' computer activity and potentially breaks Germany's Privacy laws.

Overclock.net has gathered an avalanche of stories related to how Battlefield 3 and Origin are being received in Germany (thanks to Solarian for tip). The short answer is that Germans seem to hate it because of the company's terms of service and what Origin is doing on people's PCs.

Electronic Arts said that, based on its own internal estimates, Battlefield 3 has "sold through" five million units in the first week of global availability. The company claims that this is due in large part by critic's reviews averaging above 85 on consoles and above 90 on PC - according to Metacritic. I'm not sure I’d agree with that conclusion (how much stock do gamers really put into reviews these days?). EA also said that word-of-mouth from gamers is also driving sales Battlefield 3.

DICE claims that a majority of the technical issues that plagued Battlefield 3 last week have been dealt with. Last week users reported significant issues trying to connect to online games on Xbox Live, as well as some early authentication problems for PC gamers thanks to EA’s Origin servers. DICE promises that it "will not rest" until everything works as intended.

Electronic Arts is saying this week that consumers shouldn't be worried about getting their hands on a copy of Star Wars: The Old Republic at launch. The only reason fans that want to play the upcoming MMO are worried is because EA announced earlier this year that it planned to ration sales of the game when it was released in December to keep game servers stable.

Electronic Arts revealed today the first third-party publishers that will offer their games via its Origin digital distribution platform. The company will offer select games from THQ, Capcom, and Warner Bros. beginning in November. While EA has always maintained that its platform was never meant to compete with Steam, it sure seems like this move to carry third-party titles could be considered slightly competitive...

While many customers would have pre-ordered the PlayStation 3 version anyway, back in June of this year EA promised that it would include a full version of Battlefield 1943 on the disc as an added incentive to buy it. Yesterday early adopters of the PS3 version figured out that EA broke its promise because the game was not actually on the disc. To add insult to injury EA made no excuses about the fact, nor did they offer an apology to customers.