In January, Hasbro, the North American distributor of Scrabble, announced plans to sue Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the creators of Facebook‘s most popular application: Scrabulous. With 700,000 daily users, Scrabulous makes the Agarwalla brothers $25,000 a month in advertising revenue, the Times reported Sunday.
Scrambling for a piece of the market share, Hasbro has reportedly signed deals with gaming companies RealNetworks and Electronic Arts to create an online version of Scrabble. But the Facebook copycat version has already garnered three million fans, who have downloaded the application alongside Oregon Trail, Zombies, and SuperPoke, and they are unlikely to switch. In fact, many are beginning to revolt.
With a vague threat that Scrabulous may be taken from them any day now, zealots have created anti-Hasbro groups like “Save Scrabulous” and “Please God, I Have So Little: Don’t Take Scrabulous, Too,” whose members threaten to never buy a Scrabble board again if Hasbro proceeds against the Agarwalla brothers. Whether these users would have bought a board in the first place is questionable, but the application has done nothing but strengthen Scrabble interest among a younger demographic. Shouldn’t Hasbro and Mattel (who distributes the game outside North America) be celebrating the success of Scrabulous? From the Times piece:
“For their part, Mattel and Hasbro are trying to protect their franchise as consumers turn increasingly to the Internet for entertainment. They say they consider Scrabble a crown jewel and are working on marketing campaigns for the game’s 60th anniversary this year. The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board.”
Anniversary labels and a folding-edition of the deluxe board! Wow. Office drones everywhere will surely take notice.
Instead of snuffing out Scrabulous and taking on a great deal of ill-will from the online community, why doesn’t Hasbro find a way to capitalize on the craze in a way that doesn’t enrage new fans of the game?
Hasbro might want to invest in sites that Scrabulous players visit most often while playing the game. One difference between the Facebook application and real-life Scrabble is the rampant cheating that goes on. I know some people, for instance [ahem], who visit this site and this site quite a bit while playing online. Improving Scrabble-branded cheat sites may be the best money-making strategy of all. There’s currently no advertising on the Hasbro site. Can someone tell me, though, why there’s a photo of a woman and a baby? They make family games, I get it, but a baby?
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I know, personally, that Scrabulous has rekindled my interest in Scrabble and I’ve played the board game a few times since I started using Scrabulous on facebook. Never would have thought of it otherwise. And I know that my friends who I played the boardgame with had to buy the boardgame since they didn’t own one before we decided to play.
Also, I recommend this site for blatant cheating:
http://www.scrabblesolver.co.uk/
Frankly, Hasbro should have bought Scrabulous and hired them, and immediately put them to work improving Scrabulous and repeating that success with other Hasbro properties.
Speaking here as a non-Scrabulous, barely-on-Facebook individual, by the way.
Seriously, a folding edition of the Deluxe Board? Doesn’t the standard edition fold already? Genius! I wonder how many MBAs they have working on that? I was just at the store the other day laughing at a “Pirates of the Carribean” Scrabble edition. (Surely most Scrabble players have been longing for a picture of Captain Jack Sparrow on their board … and no other real difference.)
Given that the Internet has been around for over a decade now, I’m still amazed at how many companies apparently have no clue whatsoever about what to do with it. Maybe Hasbro has been taking advice from the RIAA …
You’re a day late on this story.
The owners of the actual game have been trying to buy Scrabulous, the illegal copycat. The guys above are said to be asking for tens of millions of dollars. Now, you might salute them for putting the game out there because, as they’ve been quoted, they just wanted to play Scrabble, but tens of millions of dollars?! Sounds more like typical greed, this time by latching on to a popular game, usurping legal rights and then trying to profit by blackmail.
Perhaps you should look into the details more closely…the problem is that Hasbro and Mattel offered to buy Scrabulous, even though it is technically violating their intellectual property. Based on the revenue from Scrabulous, it’s considered to be worth around $10 million with generous multiples. The two brothers are demanding many times that amount, which is absolutely ridiculous, and that’s why Hasbro and Mattel might take this to the courts.
this is whats wrong with marketing these days. corporations, instead of embracing their newfound popularity, ultimately become their own enemies.
take for instance the terribly unlaughable saturday night live. when adam samberg’s chronicles of narnia spoof debuted on snl, no one would have known about it (since no one watches snl anymore), but someone loaded it up on youtube and it became a huge hit. what did nbc do? they forced youtube to take the video down with threats of litigation.
i understand the whole copyright and ownership issue, but these companies time and time again seem so short sighted, and seek not to improve their product, but to merely profit from it.
The first thing I thought when I saw Scrabulous was ‘Why haven’t these guys been sued?’ I hate taking up the cause of a corporation and not to discount the Agarwallas’ ingenuity and efforts, but these guys are making $25K a month in significant part because of someone else’s intellectual property.
As for Eric Meyer’s point that Hasbro should have bought them out – that’s probably the most likely outcome, with Scrabulous becoming ‘Scrabble on Facebook by EA,’ the Agarwallas giving some nominal payment to Hasbro as ‘restitution,’ and then the brothers being paid to keep running it. That’s going to be down the line a bit, if cooler heads prevail.
Hmm… careful with that “intellectual property” claim. Games can’t be copyrighted. Any patent would have expired long ago. The only thing the brothers did wrong is give it a name that sounds like Scrabble. New name, no more problem.