Tech & Biz

Scrabble Launches and Promptly Fails on Facebook

by Jordan Yerman | July 30, 2008 at 08:17 am

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As Scrabulous is taken out of Club Facebook with its jacket over its head, Scrabble, owned by Hasbro and administered online by Electronic Arts, has taken its place in the apps firmament... only to flail upon launch.

The saga continues: Electronic Arts, which handles digital versions of the board game Scrabble for North American parent company Hasbro, has claimed that malicious hackers were responsible for the disappearance of its Facebook application on Tuesday.

The game had crashed on the same day that the creators of Scrabulous, a popular imitation game, blocked access to North American visitors after a legal complaint from Hasbro. With the real Scrabble inaccessible, irritated fans assumed that there was a server problem--the game is in beta, after all--and filled the application's discussion wall with angry comments.

It's also possible, of course, that they screwed up the app, though enough Scrabulous enthusiasts are out there to make a malicious attack conceivable, if not very likely. As of 12:15EDT, the US/Canada version of Scrabble is still offline.

(As you may have guessed, I am a big Scrabulous fan: unless Hasbro plans on charging for their app, there's no real incentive for development here: if people want the real-world experience, there's no boardgame version of Scrabulous... Hasbro had a chance to let someone else aggressively advertise their product and they blew it)

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