Having a strong and valuable brand is great, but sometimes you are forced to defend the castle of your brand and your intellectual property, and it can get pretty ugly. The unusual brand story of the day is the latest chapter in the Scrabble vs. Scrabulous saga.
Scrabble has a long and detailed history. It is truly one of the great games of all time and, although many challengers have tried to introduce other word games to compete with it, none has come close to toppling this giant. The game has tournaments, passionate devotees and has even been the inspiration for the book Word Freak by author Stefan Fatsis.
It was undoubtedly this passion and addiction to the game that led XXXXX and XX to develop Scrabulous, an online game made popular as a Facebook app that is (in my opinion) a pretty blatant derivation of Scrabble. With Scrabulous pulling attention away from the official Scrabble game and brand, and Hasbro finally launching an official Scrabble game on Facebook, its no surprise that Hasbro sued the makers of Scrabulous and finally, as of yesterday, succeeded in having the game removed from Facebook and the North American Scrabulous site shut down.
So... definitive victory for Scrabble, right? Well, apparently they are still a letter short of V-I-C-T-O-R-Y. It seems that the ravenous fans of scrabulous (or possibly someone even closer to the upstart brand) did not take too kindly to the shuttering of the game, and someone hacked the official online version of Scrabble, knocking it offline for the past 24 hours.
I'm sure the online version will come back online. I'm also sure that, while there may be a few additional skirmishes, this war is mostly over with Hasbro as the winner (at least domestically). So as the generals at Hasbro reflect on this war over a glass of brandy by the fireplace, the brand-related question that I'm still pondering is this:
Was it better for the Scrabble brand for Hasbro to wait until their version of Facebook Scrabble was ready before taking down Scrabulous, or would it have been better to "nip it in the bud" when the game first appeared?
Any thoughts?
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3 comments:
I very much like your last paragraph. I think that could have made everyone happy from the beginning. Instead, this will "push pirates further underground," as Cory Doctorow and Matt Mason have recently said of somewhat similar actions taken to take down filesharing.
At the end of all this, Hasbro looks like a bully (it could at least be argued), and honestly I would NOT expect the viral popularity of Scrabulous to carry over to the new Scrabble app. People will move on.
If Hasbro thinks those 1.5 million daily users will flock to them no questions asked, they are mistaking shadow (the superficial aspect of "Scrabble") for substance (the hip, trendy, coolness, "it" characteristic of "Scrabulous"). All of those "substance" adjectives will be reborn somewhere else... they are all that matters.
Furthermore, it could be well argued that Scrabulous was creating value for the Scrabble board game. What will happen when Scrabulous addicts go home for the holidays or on vacation... which board game would they be quick to bring along? Scrabble! But now, Hasbro has potentially pissed them off and, in doing so, made enemies of many would-be customers.
Can't believe this couldn't have been resolved to greater satisfaction and mutual benefit. I'm of the opinion that team Agarwallas should have been brought into the fold. Hasbro could have so easily created a collaborative union that could/ would should have responded to all stakeholders and allowed this runaway success story to come home to mama, get legit, demonstrate that where there is a will, there is a way and left a legacy of peaceful online commercial harmony that would have been the envy of modern case studies. It's a disaster
Good words.
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