So Hasbro is using it's big-gun lawyers to pull Scrabulous off Facebook.
Nice move Hasbro. Scrabble, a dying, minority boardgame played by old people has been given an amazing and new lease of life on the hottest social network site out there, played by around 600,000 people (and the App subscribed to by just short of 2.4 million people). So shutting it down would be a good move then?!
Didn't Hasbro think of buying the property and re-naming it Online Scrabble? Or, doing some kind of licencing deal? It would have been worth just giving them the license for free. Didn't they see the marketing opportunities, keeping the game alive. At the very least Scrabulous users could have been offering discounts off the boardgame?
As one Scrabulous fan wrote on the "Save Scrabulous" Facebook page "I didn't have any Scrabble sets when I started playing Scrabulous a few months ago. I got hooked and have since bought two sets."
Scrabulous has surely been the most innovative of marketing for a board game ever, certainly I know of no better example of using the concept of the Social Object to market a product. This kind of marketing is phenomenal - it cost Hasbro nothing and was driven by fans who have no other motivation other than passion for the game. No-one is making a bean out of Scrabulous (it's a free game) except Hasbro who are selling more more Scrabble board games as a result of Scrabulous introducing the game to a new online generation.
Hasbro are grade "A" idiots, compounded by the fact that, with their marketing millions, they really should have thought of it first.
Stu
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