EA is kind of like Microsoft these days. They realize they've been marked as a source of evil in their industry and that it doesn't help their sales or their images, so they're reaching out more within their industry to make amends and have started to end some of their more unethical practices. They're not even the largest video game publisher in the world anymore, and they've kind of started a new focus towards originality and exploration of ideas over rehashing the same games over and over.
Of course, Madden 20XX will never go away and they will always make sequels to their new games and just shuffle the production down the line to sweatshop coders, but they are actually trying to actually make new and interesting games. Their recent acquisition and nurturing of Bioware and Pandemic, I think, illustrates that.