F-A-I-L: Official Scrabble Facebook apps still smaller than Scrabulous was
This summer, board game makers Hasbro and Mattel forced the popular Facebook gaming application Scrabulous to shut down, claiming that it violated the companies’ copyrights on the crossword board game Scrabble. But nearly half a year later, the official Scrabble applications that Hasbro and Mattel replaced Scrabulous with have yet to reach the user traffic numbers of their erstwhile opponent.
Was killing Scrabulous really worth it? The app was a hit because it was a game… Continue Reading
Hasbro drops L-A-W-S-U-I-T against makers of Scrabulous
Toymaker Hasbro has waved the white truce flag and dropped the lawsuit against RJ Softwares, the company behind the Facebook application Scrabulous, according to Reuters.
In July, Hasbro asked Facebook to yank the application due to copyright and intellectual property infringement. The rules, the tiles and the board for Scrabulous all looked the same as Scrabble, but under a different name. Hasbro then launched its own application, Scrabble Beta, with Electronic Arts, to hisses and boos,… Continue Reading
Monopoly passes Go, comes to the iPhone
I’m going to assume that everyone reading this post was once a child. And with that assumption, I will make another one: That you’ve played the board game Monopoly at some point in your life. If that’s the case, you probably have fond memories of it. So I’m pleased to report that those memories translate well to the new iPhone version of the game.
Technically called MONOPOLY Here & Now: The World Edition (worst title ever?),… Continue Reading
Facebook application Scrabulous shuts down in the US and Canada, as it faces Hasbro lawsuit
Updated
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s grandmother must be sad right now. Scrabulous, a Facebook application closely patterned after Hasbro-made word game Scrabble, has shut itself down in the U.S. and Canada as it faces a Hasbro lawsuit. The application has more than half a million daily active users — including Zuckerberg, who has said that he enjoys playing it with his grandmother.
The Calcutta-based brothers who created the application, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla (pictured), were first… Continue Reading
E3 trendspotting: Game publishers turning more to girl gamers
LOS ANGELES—With the influx of fresh new gamers, thanks in large part to the popularity of mass-market game machines, the DS and the Wii, more game companies than ever are jumping on the girl gamer bandwagon. Practically every booth at this year’s E3 Media and Business Summit this year had something to offer for female gamers of various demographics.
The breadth of games ranged from Nintendo DS titles like Namco Bandai’s “National Geographic Panda” and Legacy… Continue Reading
Can Scrabble fight Scrabulous on Facebook?
Electronic Arts has taken many months to get its official Hasbro-licensed version of Scrabble onto the Web at Pogo.com and Facebook, but it’s launching the Pogo.com version today and will have the Facebook version out later this month. In the meantime, an unlicensed version of Scrabble created by Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla of Calcutta, India, has been up on Facebook for months getting a giant head start.
The two brothers behind the unofficial version, Scrabulous, are… Continue Reading