Scrabulous Is Dead, Hasbro's Version Brain-Dead 395
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.
Sixty Years Old?! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sixty Years Old?! (Score:3, Funny)
Chessulous? Pokulous?
Re:Sixty Years Old?! (Score:3, Funny)
yea, cause like noone plays poker anymore.
Re:Why didn't they just buy scrablous? (Score:5, Funny)
"Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than making asses of ourselves"
Fixed that for you.
Re:Older than me! (Score:5, Funny)
When Newton said "if I see farther than other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" (and he wasn't the first to say that)
I totally agree. Someone really should have sued Newton for copyright infringement for that quote.
Re:Sixty Years Old?! (Score:4, Funny)
You're doing it wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
If these guys can do Scrabble so well, why not encourage them to do other Hasbro games in a way that makes Hasbro money?
Stop making sense.
well, at least I won't lose my last game ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:same old story (Score:1, Funny)
I recommend a guerrilla trademark war: we simply need to decide what STD now gets the street name of "scrabble".
Re:Sixty Years Old?! (Score:5, Funny)
Chessulous? Pokulous?
Pikachulous! I choose you!!
Re:How does this not matter? (Score:1, Funny)
Real Slashdot nerds don't social network, we just use Cowboy Neal.
Re:If the Scrabulous people have any pride... (Score:5, Funny)
Pride goeth before the fall. And that's what this is: hasboro saying "Mine! My game! Not yours! I do with it what I want! You dint ask purmissin!"
Re:How does this not matter? (Score:4, Funny)
Has there ever been a poll about which social networking sites people on Slashdot use?
/. is my social networking site. :-)
I am Scrabulous! (Score:1, Funny)
new meme.
FYI, my lawyer friend says you can't patent/copyright/trademark game mechanics. So, just rename it to "Scandalous" and let's get playing again!
Re:let's see (Score:4, Funny)
And why would that in any way affect their choice of dictionaries? Are some dictionaries illegal in the US?
Re:If the Scrabulous people have any pride... (Score:5, Funny)
No, the whip company is finding many new potential sources of revenue on the web.
--The FNP
Re:same old story (Score:5, Funny)
HIV. It's about as active as scrabble and gets just about as much attention from the general populace. A ton of people have it but nobody really talks about it anymore.
Re:You're doing it wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If the Scrabulous people have any pride... (Score:3, Funny)
Especially if you're a lion.
Re:Which social networking sites people on Slashdo (Score:3, Funny)
Wouldn't that be more of an anti-social networking site?
No wonder businesses have so many problems (Score:3, Funny)
They are finding it difficult to toe the line.
Re:You're doing it wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
I ran in to David Byrne just the other day. He's same as he ever was ... same as he ever was ...
Re:Milking their cash ponies (Score:2, Funny)
Can't resist:
http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c192/twinop/cant-have-a-pony.png [photobucket.com]
Re:Settlers of Catan (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Slashdot filters need revision! (Score:3, Funny)
...$45 for the deluxe version (prices from Amazon). It is risky starting out, but once you have something popular it's easy to put out the same product year after year and rake in the money.
I'm sorry are you talking about the board games or the computer games?
Re:If the Scrabulous people have any pride... (Score:3, Funny)
No, the whip company is finding many new potential sources of revenue on the web.
And it sounds like Hasbro picked up the buggy part...