Will someone please start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous?
I can't tell if Hasbro (HAS), the maker of Scrabble, is the smartest company in the world or the dumbest. Over 100 million sets of the game have been sold in 121 countries, in 29 different languages, according to everyone's favorite source.
Context & Ripple Effects
Scrabble enters 2008 as one of the most distributed games in history — over 100 million sets sold across 121 countries and 29 languages — yet its biggest new venue is a board Hasbro doesn't own: an unofficial Facebook app called Scrabulous, built by fans rather than by the rights holder.
The piece lands mid-crisis for Facebook itself: Mark Zuckerberg has spent January defending the company's conversation deficit around Beacon, which he concedes needs work after accusations it invaded user privacy, and pundit Bill Thompson has predicted 2008 will be an uncomfortable year for the platform. Against that backdrop, Techland's tongue-in-cheek call for a 'save Scrabulous' group captures a real dilemma — Hasbro can police its trademark and evict the app, or tolerate free advertising from an audience it never had to acquire.
First-order effects
- Hasbro faces an immediate binary: enforce the Scrabble trademark against Scrabulous and remove the app its fans love, or let an unauthorized clone keep marketing the brand to Facebook's entire user base at zero acquisition cost.
- Millions of Facebook players who treat Scrabulous as daily habit have no licensed alternative inside the platform — any enforcement decision lands on them first.
Second-order effects
- If Hasbro moves against Scrabulous, it opens a vacuum on the fastest-growing game distribution channel in the world, and whoever fills it — a licensee, a clone, or a new entrant — inherits an audience already trained to play word games socially.
- Facebook gets another trust test alongside Beacon: whether it sides with the third-party developers driving engagement or with legacy rights holders demanding takedowns.
Third-order effects
- The episode sketches how legacy toy-and-game brands confront distribution migrating onto platforms they don't control — enforce and forfeit reach, or tolerate and erode licensing discipline — with every major board-game owner facing the same fork.
- If social networks become the default venue for casual games, trademark value shifts from boxed sets toward whoever controls the digital table, pressuring rights holders to build or buy their own platform presence.
The trend: Legacy game brands are colliding with social platforms where users, not companies, built the audience — forcing owners like Hasbro to choose between trademark control and free distribution.