If you’re not in the Facebook generation, or if you haven’t been on Facebook lately, you may have missed one of the most popular applications on the social network - Scrabulous. A clone of the popular board game, Scrabble, the appeal of Scrabulous is that you can play it while you’re on Facebook.
And play it, they do - to the tune of 595,000 people per day! How many people are playing the original board game each day? Probably not that many.
But Scrabulous’ success hasn’t gone unnoticed. Toy makers Hasbro and Mattel, who jointly own the rights to the board game, have asked Facebook to remove the application from its network. This may not be a triple-word-score move on their part, however.
Think about it - when was the last time that someone of the Facebook generation sat down to play a board game? They’re too busy poking and wall-writing and twittering to play traditional board games anymore. But take that same game and put it into Facebook, and it’s an instant hit. Hasbro and Mattel are shooting themselves in the foot by pursuing Scrabulous like this.
Instead of reaching out to a whole new generation of would-be fans, they stand to alienate them. And even if they were to re-introduce their own version of Scrabble for Facebook, memories of their takedown of Scrabulous will still likely remain, and adoption of a new game will be slow.
The best thing for Hasbro and Mattel to do would be to sit down with the original makers of Scrabulous and iron out some kind of licensing deal. Keep the original game up on Facebook and work with the developers to try porting other Hasbro/Mattel licensed games over to Web 2.0.
But this site is called AwfulMarketing for a reason - and we’re not betting on Hasbro and Mattel to play nice with this one.
Do you love Scrabulous? Here are a few things you can do:
There’s a Facebook Group (of course) called Save Scrabulous, an online petition, a poll, and the contact information for Hasbro and Mattel.
Oh Scrabulous, we hardly knew ye…
2 comments ↓
[…] example which shows why most companies still don’t get the new world of marketing. Bloggers and tech pundits alike unanimously slated Hasbro for this, what some described as […]
[…] to show an entire new market that they understand the social networking world - and what do thhttp://awfulmarketing.com/index.php/2008/01/16/hasbro-and-mattel-make-questionable-move-against-scra…Billy Bean&39s Got a Secret — Outsports.comApr 13, 2006 … The show, which debuted April 17 at […]
Leave a Comment