The news is probably stale now: Scrabulous has been taken off Facebook after being sued by Hasbro, the company that owns the IP rights for Scrabble. As I wrote in my previous post just a few days back, the writing was clearly on the wall. Techcrunch reports that Scrabulous is now inaccessible to people in the US & Canada. Initially it was conjectured that Facebook took this decision, now it appears that the application was pulled down by its creators and not Facebook, which is trying to be neutral between the two parties. I am sure this is not the end of the story for Scrabulous…
So what are the lessons here for others to take away? Here’s what’s top of my mind:
– Imitation V/s Innovation: Immitation has always been a legitimate part of innovation. Much of what the world regards as innovation has its origin in trying to copy what others are doing. But the catch is that you should not just copy; you also need to improve, to improvise, to add maybe a new dimension or a new use-case. If that happens, the imitation gets legitimacy as a stepping stone in the creation of something that the world would not have otherwise. Scrabulous probably fails on that count… it is simply a web based version of Scrabble; they probably innovated in terms of a new distribution channel for the game (which is not insignificant), but not in terms of the core concept.
– Tactics can undo your Strategy: I think the Scrabulous founders made a mistake by naming their application “Scrabulous”, which is clearly a derivative of Scrabble. From a legal standpoint, this establishes intent. People who are making strategic decisions about building products & services that are “me too” or closely resemble other popular concepts are advised not to repeat this tactical mistake – pl avoid name extensions or derivatives.
– The Social Graph Application Platform: This is a good example of how fickle social graph applications can be to its developers. The end-users don’t belong to the application developers.. they belong to the platform. Having a steady base of users that you acquired on your own puts you in a commanding position, and there is no substitute for it.
– Mass User Exodus Case Study: Scrabulous could be a defining case study in whether mass exodus of users can happen from one product to another, if one suddenly becomes inoperational due to some reasons. In this case, Scrabulous and its equivalent app from Hasbro are almost identical, except their ownership.
From a personal standpoint, this is an acid test for the Kolkata based creators of Scrabulous. They have been smart enough to create an additive “pass-time” for millions of people (albeit on a borrowed concept); lets keep our fingers crossed that they bounce back from this setback.
Update: Scrabulous is now available in a new avatar on Facebook. Its called Wordscraper and it has cosmetic changes from the previous design. Techcrunch reports – “….When Scrabulous was taken down, it had half a million daily active users and Hasbro’s/Electronic Arts’ official Facebook Scrabble game had only about 15,000. Two days later, the official Scrabble beta is up to 63,000 daily active users. Wordscraper has 3,600 daily active users. Now the race is on. Where will the bulk of Scrabulous fans go…. “
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Apparently the Hasbro app doesn’t measure up to Scrabulous. It takes too long to load and still doesn’t have all the features that Scrabulous had (the lack of a popular dictionary, for instance.)
It looks like they have taken your advice, and are back with a different name and looks…
Sudhanshu,
That is an absolute no brainer.. I can’t take the credit here
Amit, I just meant that they did the right thing now. The credit lies with the brothers 🙂
By the way you missed another point. They declared that they were making a good $25k on it monthly, and suddenly after that they got sued.
I think it is a good strategy to keep people guessing about your numbers.
Guys this is a good first move but I agree with others that it will only delay the inevitable with even their current implementation their ‘game’ is still largely the same.
They still have a huge advantage here. My thoughts are run a competition – especially if they are making that kind of money – give out a few dozen iPhones and such for the knowledge that results.
The competition would be to explore how best their game could be changed and IMPROVED beyond its current format. Ask their CURRENT users this question because they are not necessarily Scrabble fans and may have never played Scrabble which means they haven’t been programmed to think the game must only be this way.
Things they could do are including right-left words in Mandarin and Cantonese. A 3D board. A board that uses to or three planes of axis.
Sky is the limit for these guys and they have a genuine opportuntiy to evolve the game. Once they have the new game and are trialing it they should launch it under a new company protected from their current company in every legal way and if Hasboro kills the current company well then at least they have another one that they promoted to their scrabbulous users and that they helped to design too.
Its a long comment but it is would it is, and please ignore the spelling errors I just couldn’t be bothered to fix them since I am commenting under a false name (obviously).
NoN lawyer guy…
why under a false name? cannot fathom the motivation for that, unless you are from scrabulous.
Hahaha.. I WISH at $25,000 I wouldn’t bother commenting I would just laugh my ass off and start another startup or retire 🙂
Nope its just my identity is well groomed in an area so its not about being secretive as much as protecting my names SEO for jobs, consultancy and all that jazz. My are is social media and mobile marketing and this article is ‘fun’ and does nothing to improve my reputation if anything my commenting outside my skills could make me look a fool if one of my clients were a lawyer researching to see if they want to work with me.
I am sure this makes more sense now. I love your suggestion though.. YES I AM THEIR CEO :))))
PS. Amit can you email me actually. I was just thinking about something unrelated.
Cheers