SwerveBlog

Not ten minutes ago I was playing Scrabulous on Facebook, something I do every now and again to flex my mental muscles, get my head round some general wordiness, and, of course, whup my friends.

I’m sure most people are familiar with the scrabble game that’s taken the FB by storm since the web game was ported onto the platform. Unsurprisingly it’s caused a bit of a stir with the 2 major rights holders (Mattel and Hasbro, in different parts of the world), and their online sub-licensees, EA and Real Networks (again, for different parts of the world). Well now there’s a real storm kicked up as Hasbro / EA have forced the issue and had Scrabulous removed from Facebook.

This has all happened, as far as I can tell, in the last hour or so. I played moves in two games in that last hour, and then within minutes of patting myself on the back for being rather canny there was no trace of the game on Facebook at all. Even a search for the application returned a ‘page not found’ error, although very quickly there have been more Scrabulous support groups spring up and even a ‘Save Scrabulous’ application has appeared.

I’m pretty annoyed, although I guess it was in the post. I wasn’t aware that EA were developing an online version of Scrabble with the intention of making a social networking (i.e. Facebook) version, but apparently it’s already available. And they know they can’t compete fairly with Scrabulous’s half a million regular daily users… but of course they don’t have to.

Supposedly the action was taken in America to protect the US and Canadian rights that Hasbro and EA hold, but it hasn’t taken long for it to filter through to the UK. TechCrunch called it vapourware in an earlier article this month which leads into this article on today’s events in the Washington Post, and twitter is currently alight with chatter.

To add fuel to the fire, the official version of the game has been hacked and is inaccessible at time of writing. You can find out a bit more of the conversation about this over at Digg, but this has definitely caused problems for the official rights holders in North America at a time when I’m sure they were planning on making a few converts out of moping Scrabulous fans.

As the EA version of Facebook Scrabble is only available in North America, which means that folks in the UK (and other parts of the world) can’t play their mates across the pond anymore, there’s going to be further backlash.

There is a Mattel version called Scrabble Worldwide now available on FB also, but this specifically states that it is not available to users in the USA or Canada, so the same problem exists there too. I’m not sure whether Hasbro, Mattel, EA, and Real will get their acts together and sort out some way of linking the games together - but of course there’s all sorts of underlying issues like advertising revenues to get in the way of that so even if it could happen it’s probably going to be a long way off.

Scrabulous.com is still up and running at the moment, and it will be interesting to see how long that lasts and whether there’s a mass migration out of Facebook just for people to play - after all, there’s no reason why you can’t have another tab open in FireFox.

I guess I’ll have to figure something out with my regular opponents, and maybe even revisit the game in the real world again (you can’t beat the deluxe edition board). I might even buy some of these 1337 tiles to make the real game a bit more net-geek-y…