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Scrabulous Is Dead, Hasbro's Version Brain-Dead
eldavojohn writes "Sometime this morning, Facebook shut down Scrabulous to American and Canadian users. Scrabulous, we hardly knew ye." This is sadly unsurprising, now that Hasbro's finally taken legal action against the developers, after quite a few months of letting it go unmolested. Seems like they waited until there was an official Scrabble client available (also on Facebook), while the snappy and fuller-featured Scrabulous kept people interested in a 60-year-old board game. The official client, which is at least labeled a beta, is a disappointment. This is not a Google-style beta release, note: it's slow to load, confusing, and doesn't even offer the SOWPODS word list as an option, only the Tournament Word List and a list based on the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Too bad that SOWPODS is the word list used in most of the world's English-speaking countries.) It also took several minutes to open a game, rather than the few seconds (at most) that Scrabulous took — it's pretty impressive, but not in a good way, that the programmers could extract that sort of performance from the combination of Facebook's servers and my dual-core, 2GHz+ laptop. The new Scrabble client has doodads like 3D flipping-tile animations, too, but no clear way to actually initiate the sample game that jamie and I have attempted to start. I hope that once we get past that obvious hurdle, we'll find there's a chat interface and game notebook as in Scrabulous, but my hopes are low.
The developers asked too much money? Hasbro was too stingy? Hope they realize their mistake now and offer a decent price to the brothers who developed scrablous.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Boggle clone changed its name, and its still up. There have been perfectly legal scrabble clone games published since the 1940s. I have some in my collection of antique toys and games. All you have to do is not use the trademarked name.
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I doubt the creators of Scrabulous had the foresight to patent their invention of "method to play the board game Scrabble using information technology," but if they did, they would have an awesome countersuit. Would the courts rule in favor of trademark or patent?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
For a start the game dates back to 1938! The guy who designed it died in 1993, he actually sold it in the 1940s and it was trademarked then. And they still try and extort money from it? For fucks sake.
This can only backlash against HASBRO - they will make not a penny from the new Facebook version in any case and scrabulous was advertising the board game splendidly.
Seems like a really, really dumb move guaranteed to annoy the end users.
What do HASBRO think they will get from this? They will only get advertising revenue if they can persuade people to visit their new version, and annoying the customers is not a good method to do so.
On the other hand Scrabulous was shut down by the developers themselves in response to the lawsuit, so either they are covering their asses or this is some attempt to make HASBRO reconsider in the face of user outrage.
Typical. For me Scrabulous was one of the only reasons I used FB - I wonder if this will show up in the FB user numbers as a dip?
Facebook is already translated into many languages and there are networks for most countries. While Facebook the corporation may be chartered in the US, it's obvious the leadership thinks of it as a global site.
in the mid-1990s the antiretrovirals that revolutionized survival rates with HIV were invented/ discovered in the west. but india came along and simply said "look, we're going to make these antiretrovirals in india and pay the discoverers in the west nothing, as we are treating poor people with them". and their decision has pretty much stood the test of time internationally (and stood the test of ethics of course)
however, the lack of moral equivalency of HIV drugs versus board games might not be so instructive as to establishing precedence i suppose
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The parallel is even closer for M:tG fans as there used to be a quite nice piece of software floating around the 'net about 10 years ago called "Magic Suitcase".
Instead of buying it and creating a licensed version that fans would appreciate and support they just killed it outright if memory serves.
crazy dynamite monkey
Niggle is a freeware Scrabble on the Palm that is fairly vanilla looking but is a far superior implementation of Scrabble to the official Hasbro version, but when they came out with official Scrabble on the Palm the authors of Niggle, of course, pulled it.
The problem I saw with Hasbro/EA Scrabble on Facebook was more of a problem with EA's "add more features that don't add basic functionality" like they butcher every game they touch.
Hasbro's other departments, and specifically Wizards of the Coast which owns the brands for D&D and MTG, have failed to bring a good product to market for the same reasons. Instead of focusing on the basics, they bloat with features that only make the software look and play nice, but cannot mimic the underlying mechanics. Even before Magic Suitcase, there was Apprentice. This was free, widely used, no thrills attached program maintained by fans on their own time so that players online could enjoy the game. It was not based on ad revenue, it was less than 2MB and included TCP socketing. So what did WotC do? Send a Cease & Desist notice to the developers claiming copyright infringement. Two years later they released a product with lots of thrills, over 100 times the size, and a click-intensive program.
Why does it seem like games companies don't know how give their customers what they want?
Bang on, I am still blown away that they have shut down such a popular site. Did they even try to buy it and if Scrabulous had never existed would Hasbro of even thought to create a Facebook app? Probably not.
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The feature list provided, the integrated chat, the quick loads, and word list, all describe a sort of a tile based game that is essentially different from scrabble the board game. Really, by Hasbro making an online tile thing, they are infringing on scrabulous's intellectual property. Scrabulous should patent everything about their work, and sue Hasbro for infringement on their invention.
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Deja vu. There used to be a pretty reasonable Tetris on Facebook called Block Star. It was shut down, and replaced with an officially licensed version called Tetris Friends. But no one plays that because it's crap in comparison (and it doesn't work on Macs or under Linux). Sigh.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
The theories of changing the name or the colors are out. The best online scrabble games I ever played was at www.lexiconzone.com, and they've been shut down also.
Your post strikes me as a lame excuse for trumpeting your awesome coolness for not using Facebook or Myspace. Consider your awesome coolness recognized, now leave us alone to talk about things that affect many thousands of people.
It's funny how, as far as I've seen, people don't complain when there's a Slashdot story about Perl - yet that is relevant to orders of magnitude fewer people than MySpace or Facebook do.
It's also funny how "cool" means one thing on Slashdot, and quite another in the world at large. Somehow I don't think the two sets overlap much.
#DeleteChrome
I do not have a reference for this other than hearsay, but from what I understand, Hasbro did indeed try to enter into some sort of licensing agreement with these guys, and they declined. Apparently the Scrabulous guys wanted millions, when in fact they should have been paying Hasbro. I know companies are *required* to defend their trademarks against infringement, otherwise they become generic terms and they lose them. Not sure if that works for copyrights as well. So basically, although I'm not happy about it, Hasbro had no other options left but to shut Scrabulous down. They certainly could have handled the situation better though - better transparency, having their own client be ready for prime time, etc.
They can still reach such an agreement. However, if the Scrabulous developers did not wish to enter into such an arrangement, no one can compell them to do so.
If they *are* guilty of infringement of IP or tradmark, then either shutting them down or seizing their infringing properties and handing it over to Hasbro is necessary as an option or else the infringers could simply say "No, thank you, we'd rather compete with you than work for you," and Hasbro would have no recourse.
Certainly win-win business agreement is a possible outcome, but without force of law to protect Hasbro's IP, there's no reason that such an agreement would ever happen. Why would the infringers ever need Hasbro, when they've shown they can do it all by themselves?
I think that a game's rules is not something that should be protectable as IP, but Habro's trademark for the game Scrabble should protect it... but that Scrabulous does not infringe upon that trademark. So if I were the judge I'd be siding with the alleged infringers.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
In the early 1980's I made a nifty implementation of MasterMind, a game invented (sort of) by Mordecai Meirowitz in 1970, sold to Invicta Plastics, who eventually licensed it to Hasbro. The original board game was based on a pen and paper game, and it has been copied dozens of times in web games and other programs. Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game) I built the game as a developer's teaching aid for drawing into an off-screen device context and some other techniques, but it became quite popular as a diversion. Queries both Invicta and Hasbro about permission to use the look and feel were never answered. I've never asked for nor received any compensation for the game. I've credited all concerned parties prominently in the game. A thorough search of Invicta and Hasbro web sites and catalogs have no mention of the game, it has all but evaporated. When I posted the code on a popular code sharing site (as a teaching aid) I got a very nasty threatening letter from Hasbro. I had to take it out of public distribution, though I still distribute it privately because the code techniques are very useful. Hasbro is (technically) within their rights, though I could make a case by pointing out the other clones and the obsoleteness of the license. The main reason for this post is the tone of the letter -- not professional at all, it was personal, emotional and irrational. Reading it, you would think I had taken a toy from under some tot's Christmas tree. Hasbro sucks.
The Scrabble IP isn't owned by Hasbro -- they use it under license from a Mattel subsidiary that owns it. They are probably contractually obligated to 'zealously defend' that IP.
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the significance of an argument about how web 2.0 apps are changing the business landscape.
He have caps filters and characters-per-line filters but no MBA-speak filters?
I kid, I kid :P
I agree with your post though. I always have wondered how Hasbro, Mattel and some of the other toy companies are staying afloat. It's always amusing when I see an ad for a Wii game or something followed by an ad for...a board game. I guess they make money on families who can't afford video game systems, or have some sort of moral problem with them (there are a lot of parents who think video games "rot their children's minds," turn them into serial killers, etc.).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
ANYWAY, enough of that rant.
Yes, Hasbro has made a lot of mistakes when it comes to computer entertainment (buying and selling Microprose and Atari; selling away and then buying back digital rights to most of their properties (including Scrabble and Dungons&Dragons)). Add this craptacular version of Scrabble to the pile (and a hefty amount of blame goes to EA too!)
Point being, Hasbro hardly fits the mold of "buggy whip company". They keep trying new things, and yes, lots of them fail. But hey, they could have shut down Scrabulous before they had their replacement ready, so they could have shot themselves in the foot worse.
I am opposed to the actions Hasbro has taken in this. Regretably, they are acting entirely within the law.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
It would be more accurate to say that Facebook is already sort-of mainly translated into many languages. I use it in Spanish, and at times the mistakes are painful.
To pre-empt those who want to point out that it's Web 2.0 and I should get involved, I have. I've installed the translation module, translated a couple of phrases, and voted on a lot more. But it's not infrequent that when I find a mistranslated phrase the translation module claims not to know anything about it.
Hello, Your online version of scrabble is horribly done. It takes as long as a couple minutes to load a game and doesn't have the features that Scrabulous did such as a notepad and even the SOWPODS word list. I can understand wanting to protect your intellectual property, but Scrabulous revived Scrabble in the hearts of many people (some of which I'm sure purchased the board game due solely to their efforts). Instead of working with them to create a truly great official online Scrabble, you've sued them off the net and tried to take their place with a shoddy 2nd rate alternative. That shows a greedy, broken business model that values lawyers over ingenuity. I will be boycotting Scrabble and Hasbro over this fiasco. I truly hope that Hasbro's image suffers because of this. Regards, Dan L
It's available here.
The boycott may not actually do anything, but I try to talk with my wallet in situations like this where I'm disappointed in a company. The lawyers over common sense theme seems to come up more and more often these days and I'm sick of it.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
It looks better. Some people have complained about the animations; they don't take that much time, and Hasbro has announced they're going to implement a switch to turn them off, as well as keyboard (based upon user feedback). Hasbro owns the rights to the game, implemented their own version, and are enforcing the rights.
I don't know why everyone has so much hate on for the new version. It looks better, they're fixing up the couple of things people have complained about.
Most importantly, with Scrabulous you had to refresh your page manually, or set up a 2-minute auto refresh. Not great for games with any interactivity. The official Scrabble doesn't need this refresh, it tells you when someone has moved, instantly, which really is a make-or-break feature in my book.
Yes, some games are one-turn-per-day, and each works fine for that. But when you want a play-the-game-now interactively with someone, Scrabulous was a joke.
I don't see it as a big loss, in my opinion. The new one works fine, and should be even better when it's out of beta.
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I don't understand why the Scrabulous folks took an approach that virtually guaranteed that they would be shut down. The rules of the game are not subject to copyright or any other restriction, so anybody can make a Scrabble-like game. The name itself is trade-marked, and the board artwork is copyrighted. That means that all you have to do to be free of IP restrictions is use a clearly distinct name and different artwork. It would not have been difficult to avoid legal problems. Why they didn't is beyond me.
The functional aspects of the game layout are not protected but the non-functional, artistic aspects are. Scrabulous should have been okay if they used a board with the same dimensions and locations for the double word scores and so forth but different colors, fonts, and other details.
I just installed Foxyproxy and told it to reroute "http://apps.facebook.com/scrabulous" through a free proxy outside of the effected area. http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/
If Hasbro asks, I'm in Brazil.
You don't need facebook. You can play at http://www.scrabulous.com/ - there's even an email version, which will email you when your opponent has played his/her move.
Scrabulous was the reason I originally joined Facebook. When I found that I could play without having a Facebook account, I had my account deleted (mailed them and told them to delete everything!) and I play exclusively using the email version of the game.
T.
I hadn't played Scrabulous or Scrabble on Facebook until I read about this lawsuit. I decided to add both applications and check them out. I actually thought the Scrabble app was a lot easier to use, so maybe it's all in what you're used to.