Scrabble Fumbles Bingo Opportunity

Just as I suspected, Scrabble was in no way prepared to handle the fallout caused by their forced shut down of popular clone Scrabulous:

“We’ll be back up shortly,” an apologetic error message read. “We’re working on some tech problems and Scrabble will be ready to play as soon as possible!” The game is slated to exit the beta phase in the middle of next month, and some (my colleague Rafe Needleman among them) initially found it to be a better-quality game experience than Scrabulous had been.

But in the wake of a server crash, Facebook users weren’t too pleased, as the message wall for the Scrabble application revealed. “Wow, does this suck,” one Facebook user wrote. “Why can’t you guys work out a licensing deal with the Scrabulous boys? Now we’re back to square one and have to go through all of your debugging process.” (via)

Not only did they fail to provide Scrabulous users with a valid alternative, they increased the level of overall dislike already aimed their way.

Nice work, Hasbro.

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1 Comment

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  By Nick Kellet, August 3, 2008 @ 9:17 pm

  I’d love to have been a fly on the wall back at Hasbro’s war room.

  Equally it would be just as fun to have insight into the Scrabulous boy’s strategy.

  It’s such a public screw up that I’m sure a book or two will follow once the dust settles.

  If Scrabble hadn’t expected a replacement game such as Wordscaper they needed shooting.

  Hasbro have allowed a long time to lapse since this all first began to garner media attention.

  Speaking an indie publisher of “Designer” party game GiftTRAP, I think Wordscaper has the makings of very interesting board game that exploits the same dynamism of board design and scoring.

  Top selling “Designer” game Settlers of Catan exhibits this same dynamism and it’s this randomness that keeps the replay value so high.

  Amuze Amaze is another new word game launched this year – it uses a dynamic/random board design
  and it picked up the Mensa award, proof that their is still score for innovation in the word game market.

  It’s too early to call, but I sense that Wordscaper will move faster and listen to it’s fans much better that Hasbro and EA who are both really large (and therefore slow moving beasts)

  Getting a Facebook app moving is no mean feat. I should know I’ve built my own app to promote my game. Here’s the link if you are curious

  http://apps.new.facebook.com/gifttrap/

  Another word games that is selling well in Store in Bananagrams, in fact it’s probably sitting right next to GiftTRAP and Scrabble in Barnes & Noble.

  Bananagrams also join the fray for attention with their Facebook app in about two weeks time.

  There’s no web address been released at this time.

  Of course it’s possible the world could get tired or Word Games.

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