In July, after Hasbro and Electronic Arts launched the official version of Scrabble on Facebook, they asked Facebook to take down Scrabulous, the competing app that started it all (and borrowed heavily from the trademarked game). Facebook complied, but left Scrabulous up in other parts of the world, where the international rights belong to Mattel. Now, in response to a request from Mattel, Facebook has taken down the game worldwide, reports the San Jose Mercury News .
The only place you can play it now is in India, the home country of the Agarwalla brothers who created Scrabulous. Although, a pending court case there may finally wipe the beloved game off the face of the earth (or, at least, the Facebook version of Earth—you can still play the game on Scrabulous.com).
After Scrabulous was taken down in the U.S. and Canada, the Agarwalla brothers encouraged fans to sign up for Wordscraper, their other Facebook word game. Currently, Wordscraper has ben able to attract 249,000 monthly active users, but it trails the 371,000 monthly active users who have switched over to EA’s official version of Scrabble. Before it was shut down, Scrabulous had about 500,000 active users a day. The bulk of those users may never be claimed by either of the remaining games.
They should just take it all down
… sadness.
Well, I just signed up for facebook, and I think I’ll stick with wordscraper, just on principle.
same here!
That’s such a life altering, world changing, important thing to know. I’m stocking up on bottled water now.
The thing about them taking it down is that no one knew until they went in to play there games. I played every day. One day I was playing a game and half way into the game everything when blank.
You know what happened one day? There were 8 people playing Scrabble instead of 4. Hasbro came and took their board away saying that it violates the terms of the game. (It did, it says 2-4 players!)
That’s my morning cuppa
I have to laugh at all sides in this predicament. I have lost respect for all of them.
I did an email interview with one of the co-founders. Nice guy. I’m really rooting for them:
http://blog.mix...yant-agarwalla/
It was a terrible experience having Scrabulous. My friend messaged me first to tell me Scrabulous had been taken away – and yes mid game!
I had the Scrabulous app page bookmarked and it was my normal entry point into facebook. The generic “this application message has been restricted” wasn’t very helpful.
My friend and I agreed to install the official scrabble app but the default result was for the US version – not the worldwide version.
So we’re finally there. To be honest I don’t like the official scrabble interface, it feels a lot slower and those damn sounds keep turning themselves on!
I think facebook should have had more communication about this, at least giving 48 hours notice to players, and on the “application restricted” page a note explaining what has happened, and a link to the correct official scrabble app, wordscraper and scrabble.com
At least this would make it easier for players to continue playing games rather than leaving them in the lurch.
I know I’m pretty late to the discussion, but why didn’t the developers take steps to make Scrabulous more like Wordscraper BEFORE the official version of Scrabble came out? It seems like they saw the truck coming, and just decided not to get out of the way.
No more fabulous scrabulous! I’m so bleak. And the version that Mattel have launched is horridly flawed, chunky and slow. A poor substitute.
Well I was one of the many people who played Scrabulous on a daily basis.
When the ‘crunch’ came and Hasbro flexed it’s muscles the game we had become to love , was gone. RIP.
But guess what Miracles do happen, it was revived and now we have Email Scrabulous. God does work in mysterious ways.
The ‘Scrabble’ game that Electronic Arts has put up on Facebook for and behalf of Hasbro, looks as though it has been created by a 10 year old, a very poor substitute for the suppossed real thing. Hasbro, take it down and pay the Indians ‘millions’ and put the proper version back. It is purely sour grapes on your part, if you (Hasbro ) had designed Scrabulous you would be flying the preverbial flag. Just admit it you were pissed off cos the Indians took a game and improved it and you were not getting the credit.
WTF?
I was that close to buying a hasbro board, but now, I’m going to make my own. It’ll be ghetto, but at least it wasn’t made my prisoners in China.
Oh Myyyyyy…. So sad ! i spent many enjoyable nights playing on Scrabulous… To say that I will miss it is an understateent. Guess I will have to resort to the CD game.. sad but true, poor substitute. I miss the interface with other players. It was always nice to be welcomed to whatever room you considered home. sniff sniff !!