In a Keynote, he writes, “You just can’t replicate that time-honored tradition, and we don’t intend on trying.”
Instead Lange states that Hasbro Studios at EA prefers a complimentary approach. Lange explains, “There is no point in treating this as a replacement strategy, but as a partner strategy. I genuinely believe that just about everybody who buys one of our products will have these board games in their closet and a large part of our marketing program is driving people back and forth between those two different play styles.”
Lange adds that partially as a result of this strategy, making a game based on a board game is “way harder than you might think.”
“We don’t want to create a Monopoly game that is unfamiliar, nor do we want to replicate the board-game experience. We realize the design challenge, and that’s why we’re putting world-class development organizations onto these games.”
Here is Lange’s full keynote.