Comments on: Uninformed old men harm their own business

By: David

David — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:26:39 +0000

Scrabulous was the best rendition of a scrabble game made to date, by far. The old games.com version of scrabble, and the clone Literati, both required that you play against someone in real time. Scrabulous allowed you to play asynchronously. Furthermore, you could play more than one game at a time with Scrabulous–these two facts alone drove me to support Scrabulous like mad when it was playable. Now I shun Hasbro/Mattel/whoever.

I’m sure of the 600,000 registered scrabulous players, some of them bought a board. And some of them were probably scrabble lovers who already owned 1 or more editions of the board game. Suppose these people were still allowed to play. Would more of them go buy the board game? Probably. Would any of the scrabulous players have otherwise bought a board game edition if Scrabulous didn’t exist? Far fewer I’m sure. It was the ease of playing geographically dispersed friends and strangers in Scrabulous that brought Scrabble in to the new generation. Then the corporations brought out their antitrust lawyers to claim ownership of physical AND digital letters on tiles.

By: woodins

woodins — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:08:32 +0000

Dont think you will ever harm the physical sale of scrabble. Dunno about you lot, but the only time scrabble comes down from the cupboard is when all the family are drunk on bulk-buy booze at xmas lol.

I think a browser-cum-social-network edition thingy would work seperately and do nothing but good for them.

By: Craig Ostrin

Craig Ostrin — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 03:32:07 +0000

This is a perfect example of marketing myopia (casadogalo.com/marketingmyopia.pdf). Hasbro has defined their business too narrowly. They’re not in the boardgames industry, they’re in the social gaming industry. A partnership or acquisition of Scrabulous would have been a brilliant move.

By: Robin

Robin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:06:41 +0000

I’m surprised you’ve seemingly sided with the “pirates” in this instance, Bruce.

While buying up Scrabulous would have probably been the best solution for everyone, I can imagine lots of issues that could have prevented it being a viable option. By way of comparison, imagine if this was a Nintendo property that had been copied. There’s no chance in a million years that Nintendo would settle without litigation, and you could hardly accuse them of being out of touch with the games business.

As for whether it’s caused Hasbro/Mattel significant harm, I don’t expect it has, on balance. They’ll have sold lots of physical Scrabble sets thanks to the increased interest in the game caused by Scrabulous, and they now at least have the option to market their own version without unlicensed competition (which doesn’t excuse their versions to date not being up to par, of course).

Trying to estimate the scale of the ‘lost business’ caused by Hasbro taking their ball away should take into account the fact that Scrabulous was a viral phenomenon which caught on based on the familiarity of the Scrabble rules (rather than its suitability as an online game – cheating was rife) and the lack of other good Facebook games at the time. Now that market has matured a bit I think its ability to retain players would have tailed off to some extent.

By: woodins

woodins — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:10:07 +0000

I do find it ludicrous like yourself Bruce. Never been a fan of these casual browser based games, but the potential for this is absolutely amazing. Even a web 2.0 luddite like myself has been over-whemed by its success. Even if they didnt charge, the potential revenue that could have been generated by advertising alone would have made worthwhile for all parties involved. Never mind. Expect M$, Sony etc. to have their own legally “similiar” versions on their own console portals and on their own IRC’s in the near future, and if they don’t, what an opportunity wasted . . . . .

By: Tex Pine

Tex Pine — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:57:51 +0000

Probably it would be best to call those stupid business men “past-century minded”, not “old”. I known old people who try to keep updated with the way the world is changing, as well as young people who still ignore it. But the point of your article is important nonetheless.

By: Sir Jimmy Savile

Sir Jimmy Savile — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:42:18 +0000

So you’re saying that these companies are harming themselves because they don’t understand the game industry. Although both companies have, and still do, publish various games for various platforms.

The other alternative is board games are lucrative enough and it would harm thier sales if they where to give away a free browser based service. Is that wrong? They own the rights for a product and are protecting them so no one else can profit or take sale from them. Even companies in the game industry have done it many times before.