How Scrabble Blew Its Big Moment | Hacker News Reader

How Scrabble Blew Its Big Moment

si.com

55 pointsRickJWagner49 comments

EA is the reason Scrabble has failed in the internet age. They were given the perfect opportunity to make a highly successful social game and they blew it, leaving it up to various clones to make higher quality products with much lower budgets.

My mother often plays on the app with her mother. The only way I can play with her is to link to my Facebook account, which is failing for some reason. This was the case 5 years ago, and still was the case when I last tried a couple months ago.

EA is a cancer of the games industry.

Seriously. They also want 8 dollars every 3 months to stop their obnoxious, intrusive ads. This despite the fact that the official mobile app crashes _all_ the time...

It's really hard to describe how bad their app is. The original app was hands down the worst I've ever used. They released an entirely new one that somehow is even worse.

I use an app called wordfeud. I think I paid 4$ once, and that's it. I've played thousands of games for that 4$. It is not going to win any design awards, but it is good enough. More importantly, it is dependable and just works. I've soundly beaten some beginners and have been beaten beyond recognition by experts. It has tons of users - from beginners to very, very strong players and everyone in between.

Not sure who owns wordfeud, hopefully not EA, it would break my heart :(

Wordfeud created by Håkon Bertheussen; he's a multimillionaire from this game, so probably safe from EA for now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordfeud

I was a scrabble player. This is really long ago, I feel like the app was initially OK (or maybe I was playing an illegal version?), was upgraded and was absolutely terrible. You can only crash once or twice and people just give up.

How do you throw a property like this away is crazy - this should have been 500K - 1M daily users 10 years ago, and 5M daily users today minimum.

Back in the Palm days I wrote a letter-tile game with letters falling from the top of the screen, you dragged them around to make words. In the 'search terms' on the sales site I used, I included 'scrabble'.

Got a cease-and-desist letter from hasbro(?) demanding I remove the trademarked name 'scrabble' from my 'marketing literature'.

Now, it wasn't in my 'marketing literature'. It wasn't in anything user-visible at all. The search terms were invisible. Unless either Hasbro got the website to release them (in which case they would simply have asked the website to remove them), OR they noticed when they searched for 'Scrabble' that my game came up first. Before the licensed game. Which was a lame app.

I felt annoyed they would stoop to this, and was going to hang fast. But my partner buckled, and removed the search term. Sigh.

Anyway, haven't played Scrabble since.

Hasbro in NA, Mattel internationally.

Our game in the app store could not include scrabble in the keywords because its copyrighted

But you're not publishing it! Copyright doesn't apply. That's what galled me.

(1) Copyright applies even if you aren't publishing; it's called copyright and not publishright for a reason.

(2) Providing an app on an app store is publishing, anyway.

(3) The issue here was almost certainly trademark, not copyright.

Again, the word doesn't appear to any user, nor is it in the app nor transmitted to the user. It appears in a database, one time. Probably was already there, because the Scrabble app was already there!

The app in the app store is irrelevant. The trademark is irrelevant (not marking this product, not infringing).

Does that hold water?

My layman's understanding of trademarks is that the salient detail is whether your use of the trademark would likely cause confusion about the source of the material. The question then is if your app showing up for search results (or whatever other side effects might happen from your use of the trademark) about scrabble would be likely to convince people that the app _might be_ officially endorsed.

I believe current US case law is trending toward keyword stuffing not generally being a trademark violation, even when explicitly targeting a trademarked competitor, but people are getting dragged to court over it from time to time, so that might be more than you'd like to take on.

> Our game in the app store could not include scrabble in the keywords because its copyrighted

More likely, because it is a trademark.

Likely, but the error message indicated copyright. It seems like fair use to me but certainly not worth it to litigate.

> it wasn't in my 'marketing literature'.

It was in your sales site. Your sales site could most validly be referred to as marketing literature.

> It wasn't in anything user-visible at all.

It was visible though, to the search engine at least. And back to the "not marketing literature" point - SEO very much is marketing.

Now they might be being a bag of dicks, in this case and more generally, but I don't think those two points you are arguing with are valid at all.

Exactly. A friend went through a bad lawsuit because his business partner did this very thing on their website (my friend didn’t know the business partner was playing that game with a competitor and unfortunately this incident led to their business shutting down).

Fast forward to today, where Google entertains auctions for first-page listings and happily evicts trademark owners if they don't pay up.

Hey it was a walled-garden sales site, not my own. The same one Hasbro used to market their lame Scrabble game.

And SEO is absolutely not 'marketing literature' which is defined as something the customer sees and reads. The word 'Scrabble' did not appear in that.

No I think its a contortion to make those arguments.

You could argue that SEO isn't marketing literature, but it is absolutely marketing process just like marketing literature is.

> The same one Hasbro used to market their lame Scrabble game.

> Unless either Hasbro got the website to release them

Or the garden wasn't as walled as you had been lead to believe and the terms were included somewhere visible to search agents and Hasbro knew all about that from their own experience of the site.

The association with your app and the mark was certainly visible as there was a direct mapping between the two via the search function.

> (in which case they would simply have asked the website to remove them)

Perhaps they did but the site said "copyright/trademarking isn't our problem, perhaps have your guys talk to their guys."?

But buying those search terms on an ad network is okay?

Today's calvinball economy confuses me.

All I know is that the new Scrabble app is riddled with bullshit and still too tied to Facebook. I haven’t played online since I deleted my Facebook account in January.

Why is it so hard to just make a plain app without ads or in-app purchases? I’d happily pay $10 but let me just play Scrabble.

WordFeud.

I've been playing with friends and family for years. One-time purchase to remove ads, no shenanigans.

https://wordfeud.com/

Because that's not how you make money. Thats how you make little money.

In application micro transaction with one tap buy are making a killing. People will spend way more than $10 if they can get a hint for 50c or extra go etc.

It is such an effective mechanism that full price triple A games are fully transitioning into that model.

Its vile practice but its all about next quarter, right?

Strangling the market doesn't make money. Heavy-handed ad spamming is always a mistake. How much money do we imagine they get from this?

Ad spam is not a mistake if you like making tons of money off people. words with friends is the worst offender and has been printing money for a long time.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 per thousand impressions so not a ton per person

They make money by using ads as a bludgeon to get you to pay to remove them periodically

You'd be surprised how few users are going to pay to remove the ads (definitely less than 3% in my experience).

I changed the DNS setting on my router to one that blocks ads. The game I play shows me "house ads" - ads that are built into the app for the publisher's other games and their Facebook page - instead of ads from whatever awful network they were on.

Having ad with built-in timers and then the app having a timer itself drove me to installing a PiHole. But changing the router settings to DNS was better because that gave me two IP addresses to enter and I don't have to maintain it.

That like saying scam spammers clearly cannot make money, cuz nobody will fall for it. And yet the Nigerian prince is still around.

Those things are around because they are working, fullstop.

If it didn't work - did not make money - it would stop.

Just because it has negative effect on you it doesn't mean its same for others.

I remember seeing casino or slot machine games being released in the era of the PS2 on consoles. You could play all you wanted until you got bored, with no limits. This kind of game would never be released again today. I'm convinced that the only reason there was no monetization in those games was because it was technically infeasible with no persistent online presence tied to a store account, and no way to get the user's attention outside of the confines of their house, connected to a television.

I believe that if there had been some way of extracting more money from users even sooner than the smartphone had been invented, it would have been done. The smartphone was so revolutionary it opened up all of those new avenues, and the monetization models have even reached consoles now that it's been well established that the people that use smartphones will buy into them.

What has burned me the most is that I actually did pay about $10 way back when for Scrabble and thought I was good to go for the forseeable future. They eventually phased this app out though I believe under the guise of incompatibility with an Android update, and later renamed it "ZZZSCRABBLE Free." I have never felt so burned- this was clearly a "Heads you win, Tails I lose" situation. For online play, maybe I understand since there are costs involved in running the service, but why can't I just play the computer?

I think this may have happened again because I see another version that I had installed called "zzSUNSET SCRABBLE." Its maddening, I can still play the Scrabble game that I have on CD ROM from 1997 in a VM, but can't play Scrabble in an ad-free environment on my phone in 2020.

Not entirely on topic, but: I would really like to see how DeepMind or another sophisticated task-specific AI would approach high level scrabble. At the highest level, constant rearrangement of slamming 7 letter words onto the board seems to dominate all other concerns, seeming to dominate the strategy of trying to close the board up and choke the opponent out. It would be interesting to see what other strategies emerge, or if a dominant AI simply has great statistical foresight in how to minimize the time between bingos!

I'm working on an AI and have some notes here:

https://domino14.github.io/macondo/

The state of the art AIs (and this one) use truncated Monte Carlo search to determine best plays. They can still be beaten by top humans around 50% of the time. We will be dedicating a lot of time next year to adding machine learning, inferencing (i.e. range finding ala poker), and other approaches to try to build the best AI in the world.

Well, this goes against what I said above, and you clearly know the state of play better than I do.

Have you got a source for top humans beating top AIs 50% of the time? I found this where the top answer mentions a 500-game series between Kenji Matsumoto and Quackle that sounds pretty even: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-Scrabble-computer-program-t...

yeah, I know Kenji - he's a top player and can beat the computer about 50% of the time. Will Anderson, another top player, is doing a 100 game series with Quackle on Twitch and they're roughly even after 20-ish games IIRC. I'm not as good as them but I can still beat it probably 35-40% of the time.

There's been world champion level Scrabble AI since around 2002 [0].

There hasn't been anything groundbreaking on it since: not because nobody has thought of it as a research problem, but because, unlike chess, improvements to the algorithm haven't led to great improvements in performance. This would suggest that Maven is pretty close to perfect: the game just isn't that deep, and the randomness of the tiles drawn dominates any small performance gain.

For human players a large part of the game is in knowing the word list: even world champions spend hours poring over different permutations of that, which a computer can access instantly. The strategic part of the game seems interesting, but can be almost completely accounted for with some simple heuristics and the knowledge of which tiles remain.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000437020...

If you're interested in the history and the weird world of competitive scrabble I highly recommend Stefan Fatsis' book "Word Freak", as well as the documentary film "Word Wards" (2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Wars

There was a brilliant brilliant Scrabble app on the ZX Spectrum in the late 1980s. Here it is https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.php?cat=96&id=4375

It's certainly a miss that Words With Friends wasn't Scrabble.

https://www.zynga.com/games/words-with-friends-2/

(It's mentioned once near the end of the article, as a sign of hope.)

For multiplayer online Scrabble with an active community and a bare-bones but very functional UI, try this: http://isc.ro

Or try https://woogles.io, a much more modern app that a team and I have recently released. We'll be running several tournaments on this app in the coming future.

I misread si.com in the title as si.edu, the Smithsonian. I had no idea that Sports Illustrated would have any interest in Scrabble.

E-Sports are a thing now.

Er, the article isn't about e-sports, it's about the tabletop Scrabble tournament scene.

SI has been writing about Scrabble since forever. It was a seminal 90s SI article that inspired the Word Freak writer (Stefan Fatsis) to write this book in the early 2000s (and give our community a brief, at the time highly promising, boost).

Sports Illustrated left the pure sports arena long ago.

Banjaxed.

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