Months after Hasbro and the two brothers who invented Scrabulous tangled over the unauthorized Scrabble Facebook app, Electronics Arts is releasing an "official" Scrabble application.
It will be a tall task, given Scrabulous's popularity -- nearly a half-million daily users -- and the resentment of its user base towards the attempts to crush it. Why would Facebook's fickle users want to leave the unofficial version with tons of their friends using it, for the official version?
EA won't share any details of its Scrabble game, but if it has some nifty features, it could grab some market share. But the question remains: Why did it take so long? And why didn't Hasbro just buy Scrabulous outright and rebrand it?
Even more obscure for Scrabble users, the rights to the online version of Scrabble are split between a pair of companies, EA and RealNetworks, with EA holding US and Canadian publishing rights, and Real holding the rights outside those countries. As a result, players inside and outside the US won't be able to play against one another -- not a smooth move in a world made borderless by the propagating Internet.
It remains to be seen if this is too little, too late -- or if fans will flock to the new "official" app. Likely, it will get some traction as Facebook users see the "Scrabble" name, sign up and invite their friends.
Too bad for the brothers from India -- we hope they find some way to cash out from all this, or get a new job with a startup.
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Comments
The official Scrabble version has hit Facebook, and the word's out: it's terrible.
Of the 1000+ postings on the app's home page, I have yet to read one that's positive, and the overall rating is an embarassing 1.2 of 5 stars. EA seems to have gone overboard with interface effects, resulting in obnoxious sounds and animations that contribute nothing to gameplay and simply suck up bandwidth for people on slow connections -- which would be bad enough -- if it weren't for the overwhelmingly negative PR this has generated among the user community.
Hasbro really dropped the ball on this one; instead of recognizing the application's popularity and working out a deal with the creators of the online version, they attempted an RIAA-style legal campaign to crush a trademark infringement, and completely overlooked the fact that inside of six months, their game became the hottest thing on the web, impelled numerous casual players (myself included) to buy a board game version for home, and scored a ton of free publicity that would have been impossible to buy.
The brothers from India have come up with a reasonably clever way to circumvent the original claim of trademark infringement in the meantime, while Hasbro's heavy-handed legal stance combined with EA's appallingly awful implementation of the game has succeeded in alienating most of their user base. It will take them some months (not to mention a much-improved game design) to recover from the firestorm of bad publicity they've touched off.
I hope that other corporations are paying attention to the paradigm shift -- online user communities want to watch, play, and listen, not get caught in the middle of messy legal battles. There are ways to co-opt this market and make friends with your end users -- Hasbro very obviously took the wrong approach, and despite their case having solid legal standing (really, Scrabulous was a pretty obvious rip-off), their ham-fisted management completely mishandled the issue, succeeding only in creating antipathy between them and their customer base all in one broad, clumsy stroke. You can't buy that kind of stupidity.
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