Companies Without Conversation
This past week gave us several great examples of companies demonstrating their obliviousness to the changing world around them. — Hasbro / Mattel — You know Scrabble. Created in 1933, the classic wordplay board game has been a favorite worldwide for decades.
Context & Ripple Effects
Eight days ago Techland was asking readers to start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous — the unauthorized Scrabble clone that had become one of the social network's most popular applications while Hasbro and Mattel, who jointly own the classic word game, offered nothing comparable. NextUp now folds the two toymakers into a broader catalog of brands caught flat-footed by shifts in how customers actually behave.
The framing matters because Scrabble is a shared asset between Hasbro and Mattel across their respective territories, which makes any coordinated response harder than it would be for a single owner — and the fan-built version has already demonstrated demand the rights holders have not met themselves.
First-order effects
- Hasbro and Mattel are watching an unlicensed application carry their flagship word brand to millions of Facebook users with no official digital equivalent, forcing a choice between aggressive IP enforcement and building their own social version.
Second-order effects
- Other board-game publishers will read the Scrabulous episode as a test case for whether fan-built social versions are a threat to litigate away or a free distribution channel to co-opt — the answer shapes how every legacy game owner approaches Facebook.
Third-order effects
- If rights holders respond with takedowns rather than products, the structural lesson is that tabletop IP migrates to social platforms faster than its owners do, leaving the value to whoever ships first rather than whoever holds the trademark.
The trend: Classic board-game IP is migrating onto social networks, and enforcement-versus-build decisions by trademark holders like Hasbro and Mattel will decide who owns the audience there.