Dice isn't owned by EA. They do, however, have a publishing agreement with EA. If you look at their site, you'll see they have a long history of working with various publishers. Just because they choose to continue working with EA doesn't necessarily mean that EA has more control over the production of future Battlefield series game properties.
This is a common confusion with the game industry. Publishers tend to have bigger visual billing on games than the actual developer. Just because a game has EA on the box, doesn't mean EA wrote any of the code, or even took a particular role in the production or direction of the project.
Example: I've seen sites refer to Unreal Tournament 2K4 as an "Atari" game. That's not really true. Atari as a company doesn't exist. It's just a label that Infogrames owns. Infogrames is publishing the game. However, its the publisher who generally spearheads marketing and its the publisher who sells units to distributors. They take a lot of risk by putting money up front for marketing on unfinished projects.
Small independent companies tend to fold into the large publishers because they don't have a lot of negotiating leverage. A contract might give away a portion of the company if they miss milestones, because thats the only way they could get the publishing deal. Yes, these are very bad deals, but the vast majority (90%) of game startups fail so the contracts are tilted in favor of the financiers. After all, if you had a couple million dollars would you really want to invest it into a company that probably won't succeed, without some kind of exit strategy?
Fortunately, many developers are finding more experienced developers that are willing to help them formulate publishing contracts that are safer or are willing to give them angel funding. Example: 3D Realms helped pay for the development of their Max Payne property by Remedy. While 3DR owned Max Payne (until they sold it to Take Two), Remedy benefited by having 3DR act as a shield of security against the publisher.
Often, the only way a small self funded developer can stay alive is by selling out to a publisher. For the devs involved in a situation like that, it often means a decent increase in pay and more job security.
Sometimes those studios suffer in the transition to big corporate life. Merging corporate cultures is hard and underestimated. People leave. New people come in. Things change...and as a result the unique environment that makes certain games possible goes away. (Games that come from one studio tend to have a consistent feel...that feel is the result of the individuals at the company. Change the individuals, you change the feel.)
EA is a very shrewd company. Their goals aren't centered around any one game title. As a company, they are more concerned about their long term viability than the ideological integrity of a game property they own (like Ultima). As a public company, that's part of their purpose: to make profit for shareholders by being shrewd in their chosen market.
There is a concept of not throwing good money after bad. Which is to say, if you invest in something like a new game studio and you aren't getting the return you expected, you stop investing more money into that studio. Nobody wants to think of their game studio as bad money, but the truth is not all studios remain capable of producing top notch titles after the transition to the big corporate world. EA acquires a lot of studios, some will turn out to fail. The ones that succeed are usually the ones you don't hear much about while the failures are publicized.
It definitely sucks if this all means the death of Ultima games, but maybe the damage was already done. Many of the people who were responsible for Ultima had already moved on. Origin was already integrated into EA as an operation, all that remained was a label and an identity. The unique environment that created the feel of those old Origin titles no longer existed. So merging the remaining identity of Origin into the EA master entity isn't the final nail in any coffins. Those coffins were probably already closed.
This comment was edited on Feb 24, 16:12.