EA's Origin service has a registered 11 million members and has generated $150 million in non-GAAP revenue during the fiscal year from March 31, 2011 to April 1 this year, EA reports.

EA's Nucleus, its cross-platform community network, now has 220 million members, EA says.

EA recently allowed all 11 million members to provide feedback on Origin, its digital distribution service.

According to EA's fiscal 2012 – the period from April 1, 2011 through March 31, 2012 – financial results, it's been a good year. The publisher saw growth across many sectors, but perhaps most surprising was talk of investing $80 million in development of games for "Gen4 console systems" over the next 12 months, EA's fiscal 2013.

It speaks to not only when we could potentially get our hands on some new hardware, but also potentially indicative of how much cash a major publisher will need to produce for the next generation of AAA blockbusters. "Samaratan" looks great, don't get us wrong; we would expect more lasers, Wampas and explosions for $80 million in a final product. We wouldn't expect you'd get more than one game out of $80 million in Superfuture 2013.

EA today confirmed plans to enact a "restructuring" among its employees, resulting in an unnamed number of layoffs companywide. The restructuring is part of EA CEO John Riccitiello's move toward digital – an initiative which aims to alter the composition of EA's staff from one in eight engineers to one in two.

The California-based publisher will incur a variety of expenses related to its upcoming plans, to the tune of "approximately $40 million in total costs." Ouch! Making things more painful is the fact that $23 mil of that total is planned for "severance and other employee-related costs" – a number that'll be (conveniently) reflected in next year's financials.

As recently as a few weeks ago, EA outright denied reports of upcoming layoffs. Those reports put the number at 5 to 10 percent of EA's workforce, or approximately 500 to 1,000 employees. EA corporate rep Jeff Brown told Joystiq that the restructuring "impacts a relatively small number of EA's 9,000 employees." He added, "Most importantly, EA is hiring and we expect to finish the year with more employees, not fewer."

Canada's Future Shop is home to an exclusive "Limited Edition" of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. The $80 package comes with a steelbook case and a statuette, and is available for both PS3 and Xbox 360 in "extremely limited" quantities.

We'd like to see this partnership taken further. With this promotion in place, it's a perfect opportunity to add verisimilitude to the game through the inclusion of Future Shop stores that could sell extra batteries for all that tactical equipment. Of course, in the world of Future Soldier, it would just be called "Shop."

[Thanks, Zack]

Today's big Xbox 360 news isn't without tempering, it seems. "On May 7, we launched a pilot program at Microsoft Stores in the United States to test a new pricing model for the Xbox 360," a Microsoft spokesperson told Joystiq this morning when we followed up on the $99, two-year contract Xbox 360 announcement.

A pilot program, you say? Apparently the program's a "pilot" based on its extremely limited availability – the $99 Xbox 360 is only offered in "the 16 Microsoft Stores in the US." As for that two-year Xbox Live commitment, that won't include any of the rumored "various types of streaming content," as it's identical to a normal Xbox Live Gold subscription.

According to MS, the program, "aligns with our ongoing commitment to test new products and offers to understand how to best serve our customers." According to us, this is all very weird.

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Luftrausers, Vlambeer's sequel to the singular Luftrauser, is all about ambiance -- and creating your very own form of airborne, rhythmic death with extensive plane customization options. Mostly it's about that second part.

There are three customizable parts for each rauser: weapons, bodies and engines. On the development side, Vlambeer is trying out some of these lethal combinations, and shares its experience with three parts on its dev blog. The cannon is "insanely hard to use at the start," Vlambeer concedes, but if you do manage to hit something it explodes into shrapnel that blows up whatever it hits; it's particularly effective on boats.

The melee body part offers "something like" negative 80 percent health, but you don't take damage from colliding with enemies. This is doubly helpful as it's possible to melee boats in Luftrausers. The "gungine" is a machine gun mounted on a standard jet-propulsion engine, and that's all the description we need.

Each combination of parts will have its own name, and there will be at least five different parts for each section, meaning a minimum of 125 different combinations. For example, the aquatic propulsion engine and heavy armor body on a standard rauser may be called the "Blastoise," Vlambeer suggests. The soundtrack will change with each altered spec as well, meaning "Different weapon? Different bassline. Something like that. Hell yeah. Kozilek is gonna be busy."

Looks like that Amazon listing we caught wind of a few days ago wasn't some insidious plot by an ineffectual practical joker, but rather an actual video game that Activision now acknowledges the existence of, if just barely.

Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse is a console title that will leverage the show's "source material, including the talented voice cast and writers, authentic humor and subversive spirit." Beyond that, and the fact that it's set to launch sometime this fall, we nothing else is known about the MacFarlane tie-in. Inferences can be made from the game's title, however, which is surprisingly close to the name of the first episode of season eight, Road to the Multiverse, which saw Stewie and Brian travelling to parallel universes via remote control.

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New Assassin's Creed protagonist Ratohnhaké:ton (er ... Connor) isn't the smooth-talking debutant that kicked off Assassin's Creed 2. Instead, he's a brutal hunter, stalking his targets from treetops before leaping down on them for the final blow (you may already know this stuff).

Moreover, he's a crack shot with a bow, as seen in the latest teaser for Assassin's Creed 3. Ubisoft is goading fans to do its viral advertising with promises of a lengthier trailer after reaching a certain level of buzz on this Facebook page, which we totally do not support. On the other hand, we're totally down to see what happens to the flailing Redcoat. All in all, we're feeling an awful lot like Natalie Imbruglia this morning.

Capcom's net sales are down 16 percent year over year, for the fiscal year ending March 31. The company brought in 82.1 billion yen (just over $1 billion), with its Consumer Online Games division responsible for 53.5 billion yen of that (23.9 percent lower than that division's performance last year).

The performance dip can be attributed to the movement of Dragon's Dogma out of the fiscal year (and into this month), and to outstanding performance of the company's titles last year. Capcom experienced record sales of its big games in fiscal 2011, and fiscal 2012 pales in comparison. Monster Hunter Tri-G, the Japan-exclusive 3DS version, topped the company's sales chart at 1.6 million copies. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City also sold well; Street Fighter X Tekken "lagged" in comparison to expectations, though both it and ORC broke a million.

Capcom didn't share sales data for its other releases, Asura's Wrath, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and Resident Evil Revelations, merely acknowledging the games as things that came out.

When Chinatown Fair suddenly closed early last year, the prospects for a re-opening were slim. A variety of owners of the arcade weren't able to agree to a lease negotiation with the property's owner, and the doors to Chinatown Fair in its original form closed for good in late February 2011. This past weekend, those doors re-opened, and what The Gothamist saw inside wasn't quite the same as the Chinatown Fair that shut down last year. For one, the ownership changed.

"We're kind of a cross between a Dave & Busters and a Chuck E. Cheese," new owner Lonnie Sobel said. "We're trying to do the best of both worlds." While a handful of classics were spotted – Dance Dance Revolution and Terminator: Salvation, for instance – the changes were apparent: Guitar Hero and Fruit Ninja machines sit next to skee-ball and air hockey, all dispensing redeemable prize tickets.

Sobel promises more fighting game fare in the future, and pins the current lack to "no really great fighting games" being out at the moment. We ... don't agree with that statement, but our disagreement won't change things, unfortunately.

[Image credit: Gothamist]

The rumored $99 Xbox 360 with two-year $15 a month contract is official. It includes a Kinect, Xbox Live Gold service and a two-year warranty. The offer is now available on the Microsoft Store site.

The math works out to roughly $460 for the bundle over the next two years. Currently the 4GB Xbox 360 Kinect bundle has a suggested retail price of $299 (although it can be found for less), with Xbox Live Gold subscriptions costing about $50 a year, for a grand upfront total of $399 (or less) if you bought today.

Out of the variety of numbers included in this morning's Rovio 2011 financial report, one line stuck out to us as particularly insane: the employee count. Rovio wasn't a very large company before Angry Birds exploded in late 2009, having only produced a couple dozen under-the-radar mobile titles. But by 2011, the need for expansion was clearly there.

Resultantly, employee numbers similarly exploded – from just 28 employees in early 2011 to a whopping 224 at year's end. In case that isn't a dramatic enough statement unto itself, Valve Software employs 293 people, and Valve has quite a few more things to manage. Our biggest fear – a fear that many Rovio employees likely echo – is that the massive upscaling of jobs will result in a massive downscaling should the Angry Birds franchise lose its foothold as king of mobile distractions. Not exactly a new business model in the game industry, unfortunately.

For now at least, Rovio's employing a ton of Finnish devs to craft its bird flingers and related products. Someone's gotta think of these clever marketing vices, you know!

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For those of you who want to test your might at any moment, no matter where you are, Amazon has a deal to help you out. Right now, if you purchase the Wi-Fi model of the PS Vita, you'll get a free copy of Mortal Kombat, along with a 4GB memory card – which will hold you over just fine until you order a more reasonably-sized card.

Mortal Kombat seems like an odd choice for a console pack-in, given its status as both a port and a super-gross violent game, but it is at least a good game! Prospective Vita owners have not always been so fortunate.

Andreas Illiger, creator of iOS sensation, Tiny Wings, is on the verge of releasing his next game. The project should be finished "in less than three weeks," Illiger has told Flow Studio. Unfortunately, that's about all we know. Illiger noted that the game will be for iOS but, "otherwise it's a big secret, I am not telling anything to anyone."

Regarding the development of Tiny Wings, Illiger noted that he wanted to create a positive game about the dream of flying. "There are many destructive and negative games," said Illiger, "so I wanted to figure out if it is possible to make a game which makes you feel happy." Dude, mission accomplished.

[Thanks, Sarah!]

A strange new trademark application by Lucasfilm portends a new multimedia Star Wars franchise, including video games. The company filed for the name "Star Wars 1313" for use with video games, as well as toys, trading cards, sticker books, pencil sharpeners, online social networking services, and anything else that can possibly bear the Star Wars logo.

The document contains no indication of what "Star Wars 1313" means; we knew the series was set "a long time ago," but don't know if that translates to 700 years in Earth time. However, a quick Wookieepedia search reveals "CT-1313" as a name used by Boba Fett in a Star Wars novel. So it could be a Boba Fett-focused thing. Dengar's still waiting for his big break.

The Wii U launch lineup may have gotten a touch clearer, if alleged snapshots of a UK Blockbuster database are to be believed. The shots show off 25 different titles, some of which are already known, and some that aren't. Notable games include Rabbids Party Land, Marvel Super Heroes, Just Dance 4, Monsters Party and Sports Connection. Granted, many titles may be placeholders. For example, "Zombie" seems like an awfully vague title.

There's no way to know how accurate the list actually is, though there are plenty of Ubisoft titles listed, so it certainly feels like a proper console launch. Check out the full list after the break.

Update: A user on NeoGAF who claims to have recently left Blockbuster's employment has stated that the company's list of Wii U titles is "entirely speculated by the sales team" and that titles are "there purely as placeholders."

[Thanks, Vallanthaz]

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The Angry Birds are quite a catch, it seems. Franchise creator Rovio announced this morning that earnings in 2011 topped $100 million, which it owes solely to sales of the Angry Birds franchise. "The heavy investments made in 2011 to all business areas will be seen in future products," Rovio CEO Mikael Hed noted in the press release. "To ensure continuous success we need to be creative and stay focused on entertaining our millions of fans by continuously developing new and innovative products and services." The company earned approximately $67.6 million in pre-tax profit in 2011, or about 64 percent of total revenue.

Hed doesn't necessarily mean branching out from his company's most popular franchise, of course. Especially not after such a big year for merchandising surrounding the Angry Birds – Rovio's "consumer products" unit took in "about 30 percent" of 2011's total earnings (approximately $31.9 million). That's a lot of Angry Birds gummy snacks!

Rovio's $106.3 million in revenue (not profit, mind you, but revenue) is owed primarily to growth in the Finnish company's Angry Birds games catalog, which expanded by just one game in 2011: a movie tie-in named "Angry Birds Rio." The games have been downloaded approximately 648 million times across all platforms as of Dec. 31, 2011, and have a monthly user base of approximately 200 million.

[Image credit: Flickr user 'Nearsoft']

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"Wrath of the Lamb," the enormous expansion to The Binding of Isaac, has been assigned a release date even more specific than the "late May" window it previously had: it'll be on Steam May 28, creator Edmund McMillen told Joystiq.

McMillen also reiterated his claim that Wrath will be the sole expansion for Isaac. "Development for Super Meat Boy: The Game has started full time and once it's moving I won't be looking back!" In the meantime, you should look up – at the new, terrifying trailer for Wrath of the Lamb.