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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".
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.
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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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.
board games are still quite relevant.
Every Friday I get together with a half dozen or so friends and we play card games board games or whatever. If you're playing with more than one other person the fun level of video games drops dramatically since a majority of the players become spectators. Most video games these days don't even offer very good multiplayer modes unless you're playing online, which is useless for local play. There are obvious exceptions but rock band and wii sports don't offer very high levels of intellect, where many board games do.
The most common game played on "Game night" is Killer Bunnies, not a "board game" exactly, but the same spirit.
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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
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.