NickCummings.com

Facebook has been good to me over the years. Aside from enabling friends to stay connected, forge new bonds and check out pictures of that time Steven got wicked hammered and totally pissed on the drive-thru of the Dairy Queen in front of that five-year-old, the Facebook platform has opened its arms to thousands of application developers to create an environment where social links on an already passionate and active userbase can be adapted into popular applications.

Take Scrabble, for example. The classic game of word-on-word action made its way to the Facebook platform by way of Scrabulous, a fan-made, no-holds-barred arena for duels of the hyperliterate.

On Facebook, Scrabble was transformed into the online multiplayer arena called Scrabulous — the goddamn Thunderdome of word games. This game was hotter than Edward R. Murrow (who is classified as a “level-9 super-fine” stud) around the journalism school.

And then it was gone.

Hasbro most likely saw a potential threat to the Scrabble name and property in Scrabulous, and it brought on Electronic Arts to craft a Facebook-tailored version of Scrabble to replace Scrabulous in the United States and Canada. Scrabble can already be found online at EA’s Pogo website, but it costs money to play.  But EA’s Facebook Scrabble application would offer online play among friends, just like Scrabulous, only it would include the Scrabble branding. What could go wrong?

The answer: A whole hell of a lot. EA and Hasbro royally screwed themselves over with a hat trick of gaffes:

1. They had Scrabulous taken offline
2. Scrabulous users weren’t able to port their win/loss records over to Scrabble
3. The offical Scrabble app didn’t fucking work

In case you weren’t aware, this is serious business. BBC News reported it as one of the top stories on its main RSS feed, after all, and it was featured on the front page of CNN.com

But hey, this is the Internet! If you don’t like it, hack it into submission!  And that’s just what the fans did.

So, hey, Electronic Arts and Hasbro: Don’t jerk your fanbase around. People love Scrabble, and protecting your copyright is fair and the right thing to do, but when you’ve got 500,000 daily users (making it one of the most popular applications on Facebook) you can’t just leave them high and dry. Keep the Scrabulous engine, let the Scrabulous guys do their thing, and retain the rights to the game. Slap the word “Scrabble” on there and keep your half-baked substitute offline, and everybody wins.