scrabble vs. scrabble
I've been involved in some long and drawn-out games of will with some folks in facebook. The game of choice is scrabulous. It's highly addictive and everything about it screams scrabble and (you saw this coming 8 miles away...) the hasbro ownership of the original scrabble game are not happy with the application/game's soaring popularity on facebook.
As of Jan 11, '08, scrabulous had gained 2.3 million users. So it looks like the free ride may soon be over. In some ways this smells of Napster. Hasbro could learn what not to do from the RIAA - instead of making facebook take the application out, capitalize on it. Josh Quittner at Fortune proposes Hasbro seep in and buy scrabulous, which should only be the beginning.
Hasbro - 2.3 million people and counting are telling you that they're happy playing scrabble. Take advantage of the social connections the game allows and figure out if people want to play off-line - hold campus events, figure out a way to connect on- and off-line play(wifi scrabble boards)... just do something.
I can't imagine the lawsuit route is an approach Cranium would use.
Labels: facebook
posted by joshcarlton @ 12:56:00 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Good to see you're posting again! Congrats on your new addition to the family...
As a long time fan of Scrabble I was always amazed that they hadn't put it online in some form or another...I'm almost disappointed in Hasbro for not having the foresight to make some application like this and then getting legally mad about someone else doing it first.
I would like to think that while this is going on externally, internally they would be evaluating how to better leverage the games they've developed that people love in new ways on the internet.
I do get the feeling though that they'll just sue the pants off of the guys that made Scrabulous and then crawl back into their analogue cave.
I wonder why makers of scrabble are angry over this facebook application. It's not like they're directly competing with one another. In fact, Scrabble should use this as an opportunity to update themselves and ride the wave together with the application's success online.
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