Scrabble Fumbles Bingo Opportunity

Just as I suspected, Scrabble was in no way prepared to handle the fallout caused by their forced shut down of popular clone Scrabulous:

“We’ll be back up shortly,” an apologetic error message read. “We’re working on some tech problems and Scrabble will be ready to play as soon as possible!” The game is slated to exit the beta phase in the middle of next month, and some (my colleague Rafe Needleman among them) initially found it to be a better-quality game experience than Scrabulous had been.

But in the wake of a server crash, Facebook users weren’t too pleased, as the message wall for the Scrabble application revealed. “Wow, does this suck,” one Facebook user wrote. “Why can’t you guys work out a licensing deal with the Scrabulous boys? Now we’re back to square one and have to go through all of your debugging process.” (via)

Not only did they fail to provide Scrabulous users with a valid alternative, they increased the level of overall dislike already aimed their way.

Nice work, Hasbro.

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Scrabble Kills Scrabulous – Backlash Brewing?

After months of wondering what they would do, Hasbro acted and has forced Facebook to take down the unauthorized clone of Scrabble, the extremely popular Scrabulous.

“If you try to pull up the popular game, you get the following message: “Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.” If you click, you get a form from the Scrabulous founders asking for your e-mail address so they can keep you posted on further developments.”(via)

Here’s the big question: will Scrabulous users be so mad at Hasbro that they will go find new games to play or will they decide that they really want to play Scrabble and if the only way to do that is through the official site, so be it?

Of course, much will depend on whether or not the official version works as well as the clone.  Hasbro better hope it does or they could be dead on arrival.

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