Grargar: But the thing is that System Shock 2 is no longer owned by EA. Just because they don't give up easily or cheaply, doesn't mean that they won't ever give them up. Plenty of games once published by EA years ago, no longer have anything to do with them.
Yes, it could be as you said and EA is just licensing their games to another company. But them selling their properties is not unprecedented.
I would believe that EA can sell Ultima Underworld 1-2 (Looking Glass, ex Blue Sky Productions) and Syndicate 1-2 for quite a lot of money, but I can't see a potential buyer, everyone names NightDive as the most prominent candidate yet I doubt they have enough money, and System Shock case was special because most of the IP rights were bought out from the Insurance Company, and no one was interested in that asset, not even EA, yes. Meaning NightDive just paid money to Orion (or whatever their name was) and nothing to EA which have not even prolonged their ownership, OR they paid little money to EA as well. I can't compare that possible case of Ultima Underworld / Syndicate buyout and System Shock complete ownership by NightDive (ownership for developing and publishing rights System Shock 3 by Tencent are part of a license). The only possible and crazy enough buyer with lots of money I can think of is the Embracer Group (THQ Nordic). What else, let's imagine they actually sold the rights to another entity, what about Ultima franchise? Publishing Ultima Underworld 3 would require a licensing rights (with short expiration period and quite costly), so in any case it would require a process of licensing rights. As for the Syndicate, EA produced it's own FPS game developed by StarBreeze, what about that game? I mean I highly doubt EA would sell, or leave other games intact just like that. That's not how things work... usually.