The Evolution of Casual Games

EA/Hasbro VP Chip Lange explains how the company's casual gaming business is changing to suit the ever-changing market

By John Gaudiosi

Electronic Arts was the only game publisher using the 2009 International Consumer Electronic Show (CES) to debut brand new games to attending journalists, analysts and consumers. The key focus of this year's show was on casual games like The Sims 3, new Hasbro installments like Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble for Nintendo DS and PSP and a suite of new Xbox Live Arcade games called the Hasbro Family Game Night. Chip Lange, EA Hasbro vice president and general manager, talked about the year-round business of casual games and what the future of interactive entertainment looks like in this exclusive interview.

How is EA using this year's CES show?

Casual is one of the biggest stories at EA right now. We have business partner meetings at the show in order to strike strategic deals. There will be press benefit for getting our news out there and that should help retail channel because they'll certainly hear the momentum we're generating at the show.

Why did you choose to use CES to show new games to press?

We have a pretty diverse line-up. I think when you look year on year, what we're doing is showing that we have a lot of momentum in this family and casual space and there's a lot of focus and investment and innovation happening at this company. I think it was missed over the holiday season because there were so many big blockbuster EA games. One of the things EA is focusing on to make this a priority at the show is making sure everybody realizes we've invested and we have some very strong franchises in this space that are representative of a strategic shift for this company.

What are the key games for the show?

The big tentpole launch at CES is The Sims 3. It's the number one selling PC game of all time and it's one of the most popular brands in the interactive entertainment space. The team has done an amazing job of rebuilding that franchise and adding a lot of innovation to it. We have Littlest PetShop, which was a phenomenal success this holiday -- which the NPD numbers will verify when they come out. To show this is an on-going franchise and an annual business, we have a spring release showcased. We have our Casual Family like SimAnimals, which is a new extension of the Sim family.

What is EA doing when it comes to Wii games and trends for that platform?

Party games have been very popular on Wii and MySims Family offers party mechanics as well as characters that can have individual traits. Trivial Pursuit, one of the most popular Hasbro brands, now has a new party game that can entertain a group of people in the room. We freshened it up and made it a fun game. If you look at some of the trends we've seen recently with games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, people are coming together and using video games as an entertainment platform for parties and the Trivial Pursuit game that we're demonstrating really takes advantage of that mechanic. Celebrity Sports Showdown will also be at CES.

What's new in the Hasbro video game partnership?

We're really excited about Scrabble and all the success we've had with that in the social networking space, on phones and on Pogo. Now we're moving onto consoles and portables and XBL. This is the first time people are going to get their hands on our whole suite of connected console products for the Arcade. We'll be showing Scrabble, Connect Four, Yahtzee, Battleship, Boggle, Sorry and Sorry Sliders. The innovative part about that is these games are all available individually but you're going to be playing in this digital gaming room. You'll be able to easily pull another game off the digital gaming shelf.

EA took some flack from consumers and press when Scrabble replaced Scrabulous on Facebook last year and the game didn't offer as robust an experience. What's EA doing about that?

Scrabble is a living product and we're constantly improving it.