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 started to write something else but this actually reminds me of immigration. It is illegal but the perpetrators try to claim some kind of moral right.
Now if this company had created a parody of Scrabble with odd words, would that be protected under the Parody Law like movies are?
I have played scrabble knockoffs many times over the last 10 or 15 years. Scrabble has been around for a very long time. Information wants to be free.
Big business slacking on the move of a seemingly standard physcial product into the digital world so some kids beat them to the punch? Reminds me of another industry…
Yet another data point suggesting that in the information age, you make money on ideas. With the ubiquity of digital tools which allow for copying and sharing of content, anything that can be digitized has little value as as a per unit product. If you want to make more money, add some new value to the world. The ability to reproduce an object and control it’s distribution is no longer a time, space, and effort based endeavor justifying its cost.
re: The woman and the baby
First, what picture do you expect? My mother falling asleep during the game while my brother sneaks peeks at his Scrabble? dictionary as I get 30 bonus points for dirty words (house rule) and my sister sneaks extra tiles?
Second, look at the word on the picture…I’m reasonably certain, based on that word, that the baby is about to be circumcised. Also, when spelled backwards, it reveals another cute baby word.
“Information wants to be free.”
Spoken like someone who has absolutely no intellectual property rights.
There’s probably minimal growth in the board games industry, so how can we reasonably fault the owners of the Scrabble concept to try to make money in the online space?
Same as always, the biggest whiners are the ones with a massive sense of entitlement.
“I have played scrabble knockoffs many times over the last 10 or 15 years. Scrabble has been around for a very long time. Information wants to be free.”
Which is why those guys make $25,000 a month.
You want everything to be free but I bet you want a raise don’t you?
Read the book, “Work Freak”. The book is about the author’s quest to become a professional Scrabble player. Along with his own story, the author describes the beginnings of Scrabble and its multiple owners. If I remember correctly the inventor never got much in the way of royalties and this was way before Hasbro was involved. Also it gives clear indication that Hasbro doesn’t care much about its “Crown Jewel’s” players (or at least its professional players).
Hasbro also owns a game called “Magic: The Gathering” It’s serious players also complain about how Hasbro doesn’t support the game’s fans.
Hasbro supports its stockholders, It’s customers? Not so much.
For what it’s worth. After buying “Word Freak”, I bought a Scrabble dictionary and a travel scrabble game, and a computer version of the game.