Hasbro Wants To Wipe The Board Of FaceBook Favorite Scrabulous

I have to start with a confession: I am a die-hard Scrabble lover in real life, but a Scrabulous-only player online. Hasbro introduced a Scrabble FaceBook application after Scrabulous spent vast amounts of time wiping the floor with them by having theirs up first. Frankly, Hasbro, your application is too little, too late and not as much fun to play.

Scrabulous had to know this lawsuit was coming, though. Profy writer Cyndy Aleo-Carreria predicted this lawsuit as far back as January of this year. Of course, she was also on the side of Hasbro in the argument as a whole, and while she may be right legally, I fall onto the "fair use" and "customer satisfaction" side, from a consumer standpoint.

You see, I know how much loyal Scrabble users begged Hasbro for a decent, fun version of their game online. We were willing to pay, but not an arm and a leg. We wanted it to be social as well, something Hasbro had trouble delivering, even when they released the game on CD way back when - the multiuser features just never worked quite right.

Enter FaceBook and Scrabulous, and all of our happy Scrabble addiction wishes were granted. At that point FaceBook groups were created asking Hasbro to just take the game and buy it and let us keep playing. Emails were sent. Phone calls were made. Even the creators of Scrabulous contacted Hasbro wanted desperately to sell them the game they'd made that let us play Scrabble when, where, how and with whom we wanted.

All of these please fell on deaf ears, so we just kept playing. Now Hasbro is tossing sand in the faces of loyal Scrabble users who love the interface of Scrabulous and suing the company. Sure, they have the right to do so legally, but in this online world where customer service and transparency is king, don't you think it would have made more sense (and created more goodwill) for them just to have acknowledged that their online version was a gargantuan fail and buy the version that made better and more fun as their customers repeatedly requested?

Hasbro should take a page from companies like Dell and Comcast. Long known for antagonizing customers with poor decisions about their services, both of these companies have now started taking pains to repair the damage that such poor word of mouth has done. Comcast has a Twitter account now, as does Dell, and they aren't the only ones using some form of social media to fix a problem. Hasbro wouldn't have a problem to fix if they had listened, but now their users are going to be out a beloved version of their game and they will have a poor reputation following them around. Wonder how many points they can get for spelling F-A-I-L-U-R-E on their new internet game board?