Hasbro Kills Scrabulous

When Al Gore invented the Internet, it was a simple and enjoyable place where people could just hang out without much in the way of government and corporate interference. But sadly those days are long gone. Today it's all about corporate greed and bullshit.

Today the latest casualty is the much loved Facebook application called Scrabulous. It was the most popular game on the social networking site, with nearly a million Facebook users, and half a million active players every day. It allowed people from all over the world to enjoy a version of Scrabble with their friends.

Scrabble became a trademark in 1948, and at the moment the rights to the game are owned world wide by Mattel. However, for some reason in America and Canada the rights are owned by Hasbro.

Hasbro decided that they were unhappy with the existence of Scrabulous on Facebook and decided to sue the creators of the game and write nasty letters to Facebook demanding that the application be taken offline. Today the game has been disabled for American and Canadian players. So while the rest of the world enjoys the game, we get the shaft. To their credit Mattel who owns the rest of the world wide rights has not made any decision to sue or threaten.

Now you'd think that having played the part of playground bully, Hasbro would have their own version of Scrabble to push right? Wrong. The nearest thing available to American and Canadian players is a beta version, yes a beta version, of Scrabble produced by Electronic Arts. The only problem is, it doesn't actually work.

Let me repeat this. Hasbro has pulled the plug on Scrabulous so that we cannot play Scrabble at all on Facebook. What the fuck kind of stupidity is that? They've had since 2004 (when Facebook went live), to develop something. And the best they could do is get a non-working beta version of the game?

The sad thing is, unless a legal solution can be found the best we can hope for is an official version of Scrabble on Facebook in which the US and Canada is separated from the rest of the world.

Now I can see that Hasbro have a point. No one wants their trademark stolen. No one wants their idea used by another for profit. But what Scrabulous did was create close to a million people who now have a new interest in Scrabble. These people are not going to go out and buy a board version of Scrabulous, because there isn't one. Many of these Internet enthusiasts are going to buy a real board game, thus helping the brand, not hurting it.

Hasbro have been threatening a lawsuit for at least six months now. So they've had at least that long to make their Facebook application work. Mattel managed to get a working version for the rest of the world. So how has Hasbro manage to fuck things up so badly?

I know there are far more important issues in the world right now. Like the sad destruction of the Grand Pier at Weston-Super-Mare. But still, this is just another example of heavy handed RIAA style corportate bullshit in which only the consumer loses out.