You might have heard that Hasbro has finally gotten around to trying to sue the makers of Scrabulous, the incredibly popular Facebook app.
As these things usually go, this is probably a mistake.
Thanks to Scrabulous+Facebook suddenly millions of people are talking about Scrabble again. Take a great example from this past weekend: My parents, Emily and I were visiting my brother Kevin+family in Toronto. Over the past couple of weeks I have been playing Scrabulous with my mom and with Emily, so it was fresh in our minds when we were looking for indoor activities, it being Canada in wintertime after all.
We drove to Toys R Us and purchased Scrabble — from Hasbro, with real cash money. I hadn’t even been to a Toys R Us in twenty years or so.
Now the Scrabulous folks should undoubtedly work out some kind of deal with Hasbro, but really the motivation on Hasbro’s part should be to get the real branding plastered all over the app, and remind people to buy the physical version too. (We had to settle for the cheaper version at the store, there was no deluxe (the one that swivels) model available which we would have gladly paid for.)
But probably they’ll f’ it up and I’ll end up hating them for ruining my good time and never buy another board game from them ever.