Real CEO: We should work with Scrabulous, not sue it

Speaking at a special session Q&A at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle attended by CasualGaming.biz yesterday, Glaser – whose Real already produces its own Scrabble games under official licence – said that the split IP for Scrabble (North American rights are handled by Hasbro while global rights sit with Mattel) was a clear example of old-fashioned boxed product firms unprepared for the global online marketplace.

“The Scrabulous thing is a cautionary tale of what happens when internet dynamics meets traditional rights holder IP,” he said.

The team behind Scrabulous “wasn’t thinking about IP rights, they were thinking how to get the idea out there,” he added. “And it caught on like wildfire and was a hit. They did a great job.”

Scrabulous has become one of the most popular games on Facebook, allowing users of the social networking site to play a version of Scrabble (with the same rules and mechanics and game board) with their friends – and most importantly, players around the world.

The “silly” split rights issue, Glaser explained, is currently what prevents a potential officially-sanctioned Scrabulous from existing as it prohibits global multiplayer gamers.

He said: “The problem is that because of the rights, between Hasbo and Mattel, they don’t let people from America play against people from England. There are these silly rules.”

It’s up to Mattel and Hasbro to figure this problem out if they want to maximise not only their opportunity with Scrabble as an online game but also player satisfaction he said – and Real is pushing for them to work this out and realise that the same rules don’t apply in the physical space.

“We encourage our rights-holding partners to step outside of the paradigm of the physical world where geographic distribution of physical games is not a big deal – if my friends come over from England with a Scrabble board to the US they can play it with me.”

He likened the popularity of Scrabulous as being akin to that of Kazaa and Napster for music games – and said that a reluctance to cut through red tape would mean the rights holders will run into the same traps the music industry did as it battled online piracy, but found MP3 use rocketing.

He pointed out that Scrabulous players are the exact same kind of people “who use these services […] and do it in a legitimate way if you let them do it”.

“If you look at it only in the traditional sense of a physical product you are not maximising value for consumers are you are creating an anomalous dichotomy where what consumers want to do, and what some of them are already doing with Scrabulous, isn’t what the rights holders want them to do,” said Glaser.

Indeed, Real was previously reported to be in he frame to buy Scrabulous and try to solve the issue itself, using its already-established deals with the Scrabble rights holder to ‘legitimise’ the Facebook versions. Real produces downloadable titles for Hasbro in North America and PC games for Mattel outside of that territory.

However he intimated that the chances of a solution to the problem being found is low, despite Real’s eagerness to find an answer and its interest in buying Scrabulous.

“If we were able to put together a layer cake where everyone was happy – and there are a lot of stakeholders in this space, Hasbro, Mattel, us, EA work with them, too – sure, it would be great to buy Scrabulous,” he said.

“But it would take time, because you can’t get everyone to rely on having a philosophy of working these things out – it’s pretty hard to do that.”