Hasbro, owners of the popular game Scrabble, is taking action against Facebook’s most popular online game Scrabulous. Hasbro wants to shut down Scrabulous and gave notice to Facebook two weeks ago.
Hasbro owns one of the most popular games in the world,
Scrabble. It has sold more than 100 million sets of the game in more than 121 countries and in 29 different languages, according to Wikipedia. Yet it is not satisfied; it wants the popular online game in Facebook “
Scrabulous” to be taken down.
If you are on Facebook, you must have heard of this game. Almost everyone at Facebook has this addictive and fun type of game. It boasts nearly 569,000 daily active users and there are a millions of other users who play the game occasionally, also.
Fortune’s
Josh Quittner calls this move by Hasbro as idiotic. “Is Hasbro just a stupid Potato Head? Or is this a brilliant game of Stratego?”
He suggests others should start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous, and now there are about a dozen groups petitioning for the game to stay online. The one
here has about 78 members so far.
Scrabulous co-founder Jayant Agarwalla, 21, confirmed that Hasbro has sent them a notice to Facebook to shut it down two weeks ago. Their lawyers seems to be working on the case.
Hasbro should have started the game itself, but it didn’t and others like the Scrabulous makers did it so well it couldn't help but become popular. Now Hasbro want to shut down small players and block creativity. The law will side Hasbro for now, and it is a shame a popular game will be taken down at Facebook. Just like Verizon stifling
Vonage, Hasbro is stifling Scrabulous and in the end the users lose.
