This is better than a triple word score for Hasbro. The company has been able to get Facebook to disable the very popular Scrabulous application for U.S. and Canadian users. Scrabulous fans are reacting with anger, encouraging e-mails to Hasbro, creating "Bring back Scrabulous!" Facebook groups and other such stuff in the hopes that this game would be be brought back.
Stay tuned to see if the power of the blogosphere and other such "citizen uprisings" will produce anything, or if the "old school" corporate muckety-mucks will prevail.
I was a fan of Scrabulous, and was playing with several Facebook friends. Clearly we were playing a version of Scrabble with a name change, and Hasbro has every right to try and protect its game, trademarks, etc.
But I think Hasbro went about this the wrong way. Instead of strong-arming the two Indian inventors of Scrabulous by threatening lawsuits, etc., they should have worked with them on licensing the game or getting them to create a version of Scrabulous that Hasbro liked. Working together would have created some positive buzz around both companies, and the end users would have been able to still play their favorite game.
Instead, Hasbro bullied the Scrabulous inventors with lawsuits and then went and developed their own Scrabble application for Facebook, with mixed reviews. If you live in the U.S. and want to play with a London friend, you're out of luck – the licensing rules only allow you to play with friends from the same location. Others feel that by using the Scrabble application, they're siding with Hasbro in the dispute. Out of loyalty, they are deciding to not install the Scrabble app. Hasbro's actions in this are very un-Web 2.0, and yet they still want people to play their app, but by their rules.
Stay tuned to see how this battle shapes out. Hasbro gets a D for not realizing the value of the new community in this Web 2.0. I'm also upset that they disabled the application while I was in the middle of a game. I was about to place a really good bingo.
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Scrabulous Article
I think everyone should step back. I undestand your anger. But really, these guys knew what they were doing in the first place. Why didn't they contact Hasbro, offer a business solution and then share the profits? I know that Hasbro probably would have shut them out, but that's business. You can't expect everyone to be Mr. Nice Guy. I agree, Hasbro should have worked with them rather than cause a total shut down, but as I said before, that's business. Not everyone is committed to Open Source anything.
Missing the opportunity is the big point
Excellent points, and you're right, there's enough blame on the side of the Scrabulous guys. I think what Hasbro is missing is the chance to engage the clearly excited community of players that were generated by the Scrabulous game. Instead, they chose to start from scratch with their own application and community-building attempts, and they've angered enough people with their actions to start them behind the 8-ball; that can't be good business, can it?
Actually . . .
A quick check on wikipedia shows that Hasbro offered $10 million dollars to buy scrabulous; the developers asked for more; that's what preempted the lawsuit. I personally think hasbro has tried to be reasonable about this; I would expect them to re-release the ap under their control once the suit clears. Hasbro isn't arguing that the game can't be played online for free, just that they ought to pull in the revenue from the brand they've built over the decades.
Scrabulous
Certainly understandable that Hasbro would bully them out in that they do own and hold the rights to the game...but, at the same time Scrabulous inventors have created other games that have really expanded the scrabble world. I am a fairly high ranked player who plays at isc and have found the game "blitz" on scrabulous to be an extremely challenging and fun game. We have had a tight knit community from around the world playing this fast paced crazy game. WE MISS BLITZ HASBRO BULLIES.... BRING IT BACK!!!!!!!
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