Dear Hasbro, Don’t Kill Scrabulous - Buy It
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 14, 2008 | Share This
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According to Fortune, Hasbro, the company that owns Scrabble, is out to kill the popular doppelganger Facebook app (and website) Scrabulous. Things are a little confusing because Hasbro doesn’t have the online rights to Scrabble; EA does. But what’s clear is that the only presence Scrabble has online now is a dictionary-oriented landing page and a not-very-engaging, single-user anagram game. Its two dominant qualities are boring and lonely:
What does Scrabulous have? Two things many marketers futzing around on Facebook will only ever dream about: A huge fan base and a revenue stream. Scrabulous is among the most popular applications on Facebook, and reportedly pulls in more than $25K a month. Josh Quittner, who broke the story for Fortune, also notes:
If I were an evil genius running a board games company whose product line spanned everything from Monopoly to Clue, I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win! If I were compassionate, I’d even cut in the guys who did all the work for a percentage point or two to keep the site running.
Facebook users are notoriously finicky and their attention spans are short. Taking the app offline would make it lose momentum and annoy users who are already invested in it and interacting with their friends via multiple games. So to the Hasbro lawyers: cease and desist! Don’t be mad because someone else figured out how to make a fun online version of your game before you did. Don’t spoil an opportunity for Hasbro to work with the Scrabulous founders rather than taking them down. And remember: In the time it takes you to launch and market and get users to adopt your own Scrabulous-style app, if that’s what you’re hatching, you might see all those users you booted from Scrabulous have found some other distraction to take its place. So here’s your chance to reach that elusive creature, the Facebook user, in its natural habitat. Go for it, but don’t isolate your own fan base before you even get started.
Topics: Facebook, Legal Issues |
As self-serving as this might be, maybe it is time to step up from Scrabble to a game that is about a real vocabulary and creative thinking.
Take a look at http://www.wildwords.us
Peter
The reason that scrabulous is so popular is because you can play it online with other people and it’s fun. Hasbro done the same with the other scrabble game from games.com and it had to close it down the thing is hasbro have not replaced it they only do board games which are boring after awhile if they would put scrabble as an online game they would get quite a response I found scrabulous after losing scrabble on games.com. Thank-you Diana Sullivan