7 ms·
How Scrabble Blew Its Big Moment
- jfengel 6y agoI misread si.com in the title as si.edu, the Smithsonian. I had no idea that Sports Illustrated would have any interest in Scrabble.
- asaph 6y agoE-Sports are a thing now.
- doodpants 6y agoEr, the article isn't about e-sports, it's about the tabletop Scrabble tournament scene.
- cdelsolar 6y agoSI 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).
- RickJWagner 6y agoSports Illustrated left the pure sports arena long ago.
- ChicagoDave 6y agoAll 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.
- codq 6y agoWordFeud. I've been playing with friends and family for years. One-time purchase to remove ads, no shenanigans. https://wordfeud.com/ https://wordfeud.com/
- me_me_me 6y agoBecause 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?
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoStrangling the market doesn't make money. Heavy-handed ad spamming is always a mistake. How much money do we imagine they get from this?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xnyan 6y agoAd 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.
- rstupek 6y agoSomewhere in the neighborhood of $2 per thousand impressions so not a ton per person
- entropicdrifter 6y agoThey make money by using ads as a bludgeon to get you to pay to remove them periodically
- rozab 6y agoEA is the reason Scrabble has failed in the internet age. They were given the perfect opportunity to make a highly successful social game and they blew it, leaving it up to various clones to make higher quality products with much lower budgets. My mother often plays on the app with her mother. The only way I can play with her is to link to my Facebook account, which is failing for some reason. This was the case 5 years ago, and still was the case when I last tried a couple months ago. EA is a cancer of the games industry.
- airza 6y agoSeriously. They also want 8 dollars every 3 months to stop their obnoxious, intrusive ads. This despite the fact that the official mobile app crashes _all_ the time...
- treis 6y agoIt's really hard to describe how bad their app is. The original app was hands down the worst I've ever used. They released an entirely new one that somehow is even worse.
- akudha 6y agoI use an app called wordfeud. I think I paid 4$ 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 :(
- yskchu 6y agoWordfeud created by Håkon Bertheussen; he's a multimillionaire from this game, so probably safe from EA for now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordfeud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordfeud
- temp667 6y ago
- Angostura 6y agoThere 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 https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.php?cat=96&id=4375
- airza 6y agoNot 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!
- cdelsolar 6y agoI'm working on an AI and have some notes here: https://domino14.github.io/macondo/ 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.
- dmurray 6y agoWell, 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-that-beats-the-best-in-the-world-much-like-Deep-Blue-beat-the-best-Chess-player-in-the-world https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-Scrabble-computer-program-t...
- cdelsolar 6y agoyeah, 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.
- dmurray 6y ago
- draw_down 6y agoJust always preferred Boggle. More fun thinking of words and less weird arbitrary rules around where tiles are placed, etc.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoBack 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.
- BostonFern 6y agoHasbro in NA, Mattel internationally.
- rstupek 6y agoOur game in the app store could not include scrabble in the keywords because its copyrighted
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoBut you're not publishing it! Copyright doesn't apply. That's what galled me.
- dragonwriter 6y ago(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.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoAgain, 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?
- howlgarnish 6y agoFor multiplayer online Scrabble with an active community and a bare-bones but very functional UI, try this: http://isc.ro http://isc.ro
- cdelsolar 6y agoOr try https://woogles.io 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.
- bryan0 6y agoIf 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Wars
- blacksqr 6y agoBanjaxed.
- Terretta 6y agoIt's certainly a miss that Words With Friends wasn't Scrabble. https://www.zynga.com/games/words-with-friends-2/ https://www.zynga.com/games/words-with-friends-2/ (It's mentioned once near the end of the article, as a sign of hope.)