Hasbro Drops Scrabulous Lawsuit
Hasbro today announced that it has dropped its lawsuit against the makers of Scrabulous, the popular Facebook Scrabble clone that was forced to shut down earlier this year. Scrabulous later reappeared as Wordscraper, a reimagined version of Scrabble, but this app was decisively less popular than the original. Hasbro's own Scrabble game on Facebook also never quite caught on with the old Scrabulous fan base.
It is not clear why Hasbro decided to drop the lawsuit, but chances are that Hasbro got all it wanted, as the developers made substantial changes to both Wordscraper and Lexulous, the stand-alone version of Wordscaper.
According to Hasbro, this agreement also "provides people in the U.S. and Canada with a choice of different games and also avoids potentially lengthy and costly litigation."
However, most users really liked the old Scrabulous and preferred it over Hasbro's own alternative, though according to AllFacebook, Hasbro's version is slowly picking up more users now. Hasbro's Scrabble app is currently rated 1.3 out of 5 on Facebook.
Thanks to this agreement, neither Hasbro nor Scrabulous' developers, RJ Software, have to face a long and expensive legal battle, and RJ Software can still offer Wordscraper and Lexulous.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Big loss for RJ Software... Nobody really wants to play a game that looks like Scrabble but is not really Scrabble. I certainly don't. Too bad for all the efforts they put into the original Scrabulous.
Number one reason why the official EA Scrabble sucks: no ability to play with anyone around the world (there is no protocol to let an EA/Hasbro instance play with a Real/Mattel instance). Also, the embedded dictionaries kinda suck (there should be a choice of TWL and SOWPODS, at a minimum, plus official Scrabble dictionaries in other languages).
The owner of Scrabble's rights should understand that this is a global world, where people in the US wish to play with people from Australia, for example, and that people may also be interested in developing skills in other languages while playing Scrabble.
One more thing... There should be a way to manage a tournament from within the game. Once again, the owner(s) of Scrabble's rights are just showing how disconnected they are with what people really want, as well as viral/network effects, social networks, and whatnot. Welcome to the 21st century, people!
"The owner of Scrabble's rights should understand that this is a global world, where people in the US wish to play with people from Australia, for example, and that people may also be interested in developing skills in other languages while playing Scrabble."
The problem is that there isn't a single owner of the rights to Scrabble. Both Mattel and Hasbro would love to own the universal rights but neither is going to sell their own rights to the other.
Yeah, I am well aware of that, as suggested in my earlier post (EA/Hasbro vs. Real/Mattel). Thus, the idea of implementing a common protocol so that any version can play with any other version... As a result, everybody keeps selling Scrabble in their respective markets, and furthermore potentially expands these markets with the addition of people who find an interest in playing Scrabble just because they have a friend who plays Scrabble but lives in a different Scrabble market.
On a different note, they are also behind on the iPhone, where network play is not currently possible (unlike so many other iPhone apps).
Maybe they were in a good mood today - it's Scrabble's 60th birthday.
Colossal waste of time and lost opportunities IMO ... http://tinyurl.com/4krvrz
Updating a program is usually a good idea,but in some cases its not good. That is what we're here for! There have been
several instances where a new release of a program is not always good.reason is several factors.
visit may be usefull for all
http://old-versions.org/