Why they haven't announced it officially is beyond my comprehension of video game marketing.
News sites like to treat unannounced games like a big secret they've revealed, but they're usually sitting in plain site--trawl through some Electronic Arts resumes on LinkedIn and you'll find plenty of them. Actual game announcements are part of a carefully planned marketing strategy that the company is paying a PR firm for. They're usually a fixed point in time instead of a reactive thing for a number of reasons:
- The announcement is one of the specific points where you are guaranteed "buzz", which allows you to shape the message. EA knows that announcing a new game means they're going to grab headlines and that it's their best chance to control the response... so it usually involves wining and dining journalists, showing them the game in what they think is the best light and so on.
- Your advertising budget starts burning the minute the game is announced. That doesn't necessarily mean you immediately have an ad buy and plaster Ultima Forever on the side of a fleet of buses... but you do have a team of people working from that moment forward to monitor response to the game and to work on managing expectations.
- Announcing a game and then cancelling it is especially bad business. EA puts money into lots of projects that never happen, that's part of your standard R&D budget and is completely expected... but announcing a game and never shipping it is bad for the company's image and is something shareholders specifically react poorly to. (If anything, a "leak" like this is a positive thing for EA--they get a preview of how everyone is going to react to the title and can react accordingly...)
My guess is that if anything this will delay plans for announcing/launching the game... because the fog of war here has convinced a lot of people that there's a new AAA Ultima in development when what's really happening is a retro-styled Facebook game. There's probably a frustrated PR guy trying to figure out how to deal with that unexpected confusion somewhere right now... and the best answer may be to wait it out.
