Well seems like 2 years is enough time to make games. Most developers got the 3DS dev kits 1 year efore the release.

According to a listing on LinkedIn, an engineer at EA North Carolina was working on "audio support for an unannounced title on an unannounced Nintendo platform" from August to October of 2010.

Being that EA North Carolina handled development of the recently released 3DS game, Madden NFL Football, it's easy to assume that the work this developer did was in relation to that game; however, by August of last year, the 3DS was known far and wide thanks to its incredible exposure at E3 2010.

Additionally, EA North Carolina has also handled the ports of a couple other games to both the Wii and PlayStation 2. As such, it might make sense that the team is focusing their efforts on moving an upcoming EA Sports title over to Project Cafe while one of the other teams is preparing the main release on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

http://www.pixlbit.com/news?action=showNewsArticle&newsArticleId=1107&t=has_ea_been_developing_for_project_cafe_since_august_2010

Good, hopefully this translates to good launch games from third parties.

It makes sense, thats the reason EA and Nintendo were so buddy buddy at E3's recently.

Sounds about right; dev kits are usually sent out ahead of time so developers can get a head start on stuff.

lol, I was going to post something similar.  Maybe it can also be seen as a contradiction in terms?

:D
Smells like a paradox!

Hope this time EA really tries hard.

It never ends!

Great if it's true.   It does take 2yrs now to make a AAA HD title so if 3rd parties have had Cafe since Aug '10 or earlier it'll mean there will be a ton of titles hitting Cafe from the get go, unlike 3DS which seems didn't give enough development time before launch (even for Nintendo) and is suffering because of it.