A few years ago we might not have believed it, but EA has fallen on tough economic times, and the world’s second biggest games publisher is being forced to make some cutbacks. This time the victim is EA Blueprint, a casual games studio working under EA.

A former employee confirmed that everyone in the project has quit, been fired, or moved on to other projects. The interesting thing about this story is that EA never actually confirmed EA Blueprint existed until they announced its death.

Not much is known about the project, but apparently it had about twelve employees working on several projects. Rumor has it that they were working on Boom Blox 2 and a host of other games that were meant for distribution on social networking sites.

Spore was also being worked on by EA Blueprint for a short period of time, and they had ownership of the several projects being worked on by Steven Spielberg.

Blueprint also apparently had dealings with Armature Studios, which was formed by several of the creators of Metroid Prime after they left Retro.

EA Blueprint was never technically outright shut down, but EA simply removed all employees from the project. The games being developed were reportedly moved along with many employees to EA’s Casual/Sims development house.

Over the last month, the video game industry has been hit hard by the economic crisis, and while we’ve yet to see many companies completely going under, practically everyone is doing a little belt tightening to brace for the storm ahead.