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.

Comments

As much as I am against IP law

[Jafafa Hots]

if they had just changed the name and maybe the colors, problem solved - they would not have been shut down, and no users would have left.

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.

Re:Why didn't they just buy scrablous?

[jedidiah]

It's a crossword puzzle!

It's older than your grandpa.

There's nothing to "rip off".

The only thing left that's not public domain is the name.

This is why there are monopoly knockoffs. Their patent
on a PD game invented by the Quakers expired a long
time ago.

Re:If the Scrabulous people have any pride...

[LargeWu]

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.

Re:If the Scrabulous people have any pride...

[Relic of the Future]

And what, pray tell, is wrong with board games? I like board games, I've spent a lot of money on board games. Before Japanese-styled cartoons caught on, it was considered that "cartoons are for kids"; and German-style board games are fighting the same "for kids" hurdles in the same way anime did for cartoons (by being AWESOME.) Seriously, at least try Settlers of Catan before you knock on board games (it's like the Ninja Scroll of board games; for some reason, it's often the first thing people try, and it gets them interested in trying more things.)

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.

Re:Slashdot filters need revision!

[twistedsymphony]

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.