If Scrabulous goes from Facebook, will you miss it?
July 27, 2008 | Filed under News
Most people that use Facebook are doing so to keep in contact with friends and family from all around the world. But some also go to the social networking site to play games regularly.
Scrabulous is a game that is used by millions of Facebook users and this Scrabble knockoff has attracted the attention of Hasbro who own the Scrabble game.
If Scrabulous is removed from Facebook, how would that affect your time on the social network?
It’s a shame Hasbro could not find a middle ground with Scrabulous. The Facebook game has around 513,000 people playing it everyday. Maybe Facebook should share some of the revenue with Hasbro for the advertisements viewed while people play the game.
Hasbro have filed an intellectual property lawsuit against the Scrabulous creators. Facebook have forwarded a takedown notice to Scrabulous and expect the appropriate response from them.
It now looks like Scrabulous will be taken down and no petition groups will stop that.
Source: Read | More news about Facebook.
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Miss what?
Allow me to re-phrase your question:
“If Facebook goes, will you miss it?”
(Answer: A resounding no!!! This is one of several threads:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/20/studivz-wont-comment-on-facebook-lawsuit-but-will-talk-smack-in-general/#comment-2414018)
Miss scrabulous, MORON!
Playing Scrabulous has become a daily ritual. I’ve had as many as 11 games going at one time! In the short time that I’ve been playing, it’s not only increased my vocabulary and but also stimulated the synapses that are involved with verbal skills. I’m positive it’s helping to keep me young! I wish Hasbro would come to some kind of compromise with the makers of Scrabulous.
Ummmm… Facebook? What is Facebook and why should I care? Let alone this game. How about getting a life people and actually interacting with other humans face to face?
Hasbro is making a mistake in not given some license for the game. I strongly suspect they sell more Scrabble games as a direct result of Scrabulous. I actually own both the Scrabble board game and the PC Scrabble Program, but I rarely play and don’t use Scrabulous. However those that play the game are all new candidates for Scrabble, since a PC is only a great platform for playing with others online or playing against a computer if it is working and not being used by someone else in the family. It doesn’t make it easy to play visiting family or friends unless you have multiple computers at home with their own monitors.
Removal will not affect me personally primarily because I refuse to sign up for Face Book because I feel they ask too much information that might facilitate credit fraud if not kept private. I never, for example, given my actual, honest birthday, although I am willing to give either an age range or a birth year. Young people just haven’t learned the value of personal information security.
Yep it will be missed - So then I hope it goes to another platform…
All I think is Hasbro wants a piece of the pie the Scrabulous app has…
I won’t play Scrabble rendition, as it’s crap plus way to fluffy with all the animations..
I also own an original Scrabble board for over 30yrs now. I never play anyone on it.
Scrabulous has given the word game a new lease of life.
Why can’t there be many clones available? Available & the best of them win the audience favour, than resorting to litigation.
Stuff Scrabble carry on with your childish bully boy tactics of, “I own this game & no one else can copy or make a similar game to mine!”
Hasbro could not have dreamed up a better way to promote Scrabble if they tried.
Scrabulous is the No1 game on Facebook, so Facebook are in no hurry to see it go down.
Equally I’m sure Hasbro would like to see this run for a while longer to gain maximum exposure.
It’s funny.
I’m a board game publisher ( http://www.gifttrap.com/ ) and I know lots of independent board game publishers who, like me, would jump at the chance of getting 500k users per day playing and talking about your game even if you didn’t own the site that’s collecting $25k/month in ad revenue.
Hasbro and Mattel have both benefited from sales increases due to the born again popularity of their cash-cow game.
I have total respect for the Scrabulous guys. We created a Facebook app in the vein of Free Gifts to help promote our game but getting your social app moving is no mean feat. Translating a board game to an online game is far from obvious.
The Free Gifts apps get 100k daily active users on Facebook, which is pretty cool. Our game precedes Free Gifts, but you can’t fight the viral nature and you’ve got to be first on the right platform.
Check out our app here; http://apps.new.facebook.com/gifttrap/
Unlike the Free Gifts app your friend gets to choose their own gift, the question is will you match. We have turned virtual gifts into a game.
The GiftTRAP board game is on sale in Barnes and Noble right now which is pretty cool (no doubt next to Scrabble). I’m just a few million copies behind them but gaining fast, but then we do have some pretty cool awards to our name
I hope the Scrabulous stays on Facebook, but who knows.
Scrabulous is amazing, and I love to play with people that live far away from me. As for Fred telling people to “get a life and interacting with humans face to face” I find it interesting that he chose to post his feelings on a website and not to a human face to face. Maybe someone else needs to get a life.
Fred said “How about getting a life people and actually interacting with other humans face to face?”
That’s a cliché thing to say that doesn’t bear much weight in the world we live in today. Besides, there are many people who have busy lives outside of their homes but can still find uses for what Facebook has to offer. When my best friend was overseas for a year, we kept in touch a little through the site and played many Scrabulous games.
If you regularly use e-mail, text messages, or instant messaging (msn, yahoo etc) then it’s not much different.
When your siblings are on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is nice to have an way to play board games with them. I would probably miss it because I like Scrabble, but there’s always another game out there to play with my siblings… until a different company and Facebook decide to duke it out in court because neither can communicate reasonably or think outside the corporate box.
Even if banned from Facebook you will be able to play Scrabulous though its website at http://www.scrabulous. com.
P.S. I see someone has set up a competing site at http://www.scrabbulous.com. Watch your typing.
P.S.S. For serious Scrabble players I recommend the Internet Scrabble Club.
I don’t have facebook, I don’t play Scrabulus and i don’t advocate using copyrighted games (nor cloning of one). Like I don’t advocate listening to copyrighted music or TV programs. If you see something Copyrighted simply don’t use . Stay away from it use something made by people. If we all would do that we would have to only pay for phone and Internet connection. No copyright issues would arise and we would be free people. That way they Copyright the product and use themselves. The products will be for internal use only.
While everyone else uses Open Source, Public Domain etc. Hopefully same rule will apply to linux. To free ourselves of copyrighted operating systems. By having a working “different” alternative.
Would you rather pay a fine or be a free person? Enjoy the benefits of using something with no strings attached!
While I agree that Hasbro has a good legal point here, the “official” scrabble game they’ve posted on Facebook is AWFUL. Slow, with useless animation and etc. Scrabulous just works. It’s quick and easy to play. It would be much better if the scrabulous folks were forced to give a portion/all of their company to Hasbro.
I think tis copyright bullshit is ridiculous. The onventor of the game should be concerned, not some idiotic company that owns the copyright just because it had the money to buy it. The makers of the game are not even trying to make money out of it. Hasbro should be banned.
Well, I’ve played Scraulous but never have used Facebook.
So no, I won’t miss it from facebook. As long as it still exists I don’t care whether facebook has it or not.
Scrabulous is fabulous! I will go into a deep depression without my daily fix. I have about 15 games going at any given time. It’s my latest addiction and i LOVE it.
Shame on Hasbro, as if they don’t have enough revenue. I think i will have to boycott Hasbro is Scrabulous is taken from me. Anyone else like that idea? I buy their wares quite often for my preschoolers. Maybe no more.
I play Scrabulous weekly, if not daily. I was always a fan of the board game, but everything I do these days is online. I shop online, I play online, I work online. That’s just a fact of life in 2008.
Having said that, I think Hasbro has every right to sue Scrabulous as we all know it’s Scrabble with the slightly changed name. Now do I care if Scrabulous.com goes away? Not really. I would just want a platform as good as Scrabulous (let’s not talk about the lagging, quitting and cheating problems) to play on if Scrabulous was gone.
The problem Hasbro is having is that the platform they released is absolutely pitiful. See: http://www.hasbro.com/games/adult-games/scrabble/home.cfm?page=Entertainment/justforfun for links to play on Fbook and Pogo. Just a horrible example of how not to build a gaming platform. It’s hard to believe with Scrabulous so popular they didn’t learn something.
In any event, with the absence of Scrabulous, users will not be flocking to Hasbro unless they can offer a similar platform that’s as user-friendly as Scrabulous. I’d say 99% of the Scrabulous users would agree. So they’re not going to capture any market share here. The best thing for them to do would be to work something out with revenue-sharing that I’m sure the boys at Scrabulous would be happy to do to avoid shutting down.
Like any big company they have decided to bully a couple of young guys who basically made the otherwise boring board game interesting.
http://tinyurl.com/5mdvzh
I like many others here, always have a few games going with relatives and friends who do not live near me. Scrabulous is easy to play on Facebook with little lag. I do not like Scrabble’s version of the game and will not use it.
YES! I play scrabulous everyday and have met many friends through the game as well as reconnected with other friends by playing this game. I think that Hasboro has sold more games as a result of this internet game and should drop this suit or work together with the makers…
Fred on July 27th, 2008 1:55 pm
Ummmm… Facebook? What is Facebook and why should I care? Let alone this game. How about getting a life people and actually interacting with other humans face to face?
Says the guy anonymously on a website.
If you don’t know what the article is about, and don’t care to learn, then don’t bother wasting everyone’s time by putting up inflammatory posts.
All Scrabulous has to do is tweak things to keep the feel of the game without violating any intellectual rights. There are plenty of Scrabble clones out there. Sadly though, Facebook might just remove it to save itself the trouble of having to deal with it.
Now inaccessible through Facebook for US and Canadian users.
(Imagine rant about DMCA and copyright laws here.)
I absolutely love Scrabulous.
I usally have between 10 and 20 games going at once. All with my friends and relatives. Every morning and every second of the day when I have a minute I play my games.
I really will miss it terribly. I have tried Scrabble by Hasbro on Facebook and it is absolutely terrible. Not worth playing at all.
Please do your best to settle this disagreement as I and many of my friends are alreadly missing it.
PS My daughter only goes on Facebook for Scrabulous and it took us so long to get her on!!!
Yours truly
Wendy MacNeil
oh it was great fun playing scrabble on line, i felt ever so mentally alive and experienced different players of various age groups from different walks of life and their modes of playing, it was real fun and i miss playing it and my heart skipped a beat when all my 10-12 active games were suddenly just dropped !
a part of me just dropped !!!
Yes I will miss scrabulous, and for that reason I am boycotting Hasbro and I am encouraging everyone else who enjoyed the game to boycott also. Let Hasbro know that you will not purchase any more games or products from them. It them where it hurts, the pocket book. This works alot better than you might think.
Scrabulous is now Lexulous - at http://www.Lexulous.com
Same great Scrabulous game as before w/ a new name. Perhaps this will keep Hasbro off their back for a while more.
For those of you boycotting and not purchasing any more Hasbro games, you’re all ridiculous. Hasbro was protecting their intellectual property rights. You’d do the same thing if someone took your idea and reproduced it exactly and profited from it without your knowledge. The law is there to protect us, not screw us.