You may have heard by now that Hasbro and Mattel are trying to get the plug pulled on Scrabulous, the user-created Scrabble application created for Facebook. It's one of the most popular applications on the site, with nearly 600,000 daily users... myself included. There's no argument that Scrabulous is violating their copyright, but why would Hasbro and Mattel stick their head all the way up the gift horse's mouth and rip out its intestines? I'm not sure if they've been paying attention, but with all the entertainment options available today, people aren't exactly tripping over themselves to snatch up all the board games on the shelves.
Clearly, anyone can see that Scrabulous has been the best thing to happen to Scrabble in a long time. I'm a case in point for this... I own the Scrabble board game, but I've only played it twice. Once Scrabulous came along, it gave me a renewed interest in the game. I have several games running concurrently now, and yes, I've actually played the REAL board game a few more times because of it.
I can only think about the sheer amount of angst that Hasbro and Mattel are creating because of this demand to pull Scrabulous from Facebook. Think about how much more positive press and brand affinity they would have created for rewarding the ingenuity of the Scrabulous creators by purchasing it from them. This is ingenuity they obviously can only pay for...
Yes, I'm a bit sore on the subject because I love Scrabulous soo much. And the folks at Hasbro and Mattel can rest assured that if they succeed in this dim-witted legal task, there will be one less Scrabble board game in existence, because I will boycott the tiles for life.
More from the BBC here.
Join the Facebook group, Save Scrabulous!
