The last couple of days have seen two well-liked, but extremely familiar, games bite the dust thanks to threatened legal action from corporate heavyweights. Scrabulous was withdrawn a while ago in the States but Mattel/Hasbro's word puzzle jihad has now extended to the rest of the world - Facebook has removed the app from all territories apart from India, where creators Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla are based. Meanwhile, the brothers are promoting their replacement, Wordscraper, and Hasbro is pushing EA's official Facebook Scrabble game, currently only available in the States.
Meanwhile, a free iPhone version of Tetris named Tris is apparently being yanked from the App Store after creator Noah Witherspoon received complaints from Apple and The Tetris Company. Witherspoon has blogged about the threats:
The approach they're taking seems to me little more than petty bullying. They have little to no legitimate legal claim, and are, presumably, relying on my being a small developer with insufficient resources to defend myself. And -- hey ho -- it appears to be working. All I can suggest is that, if you have the slightest interest in playing Tris, you download it while you still can.
It's interesting. The Flash game scene is built largely on the appropriation and subtle evolution of well-known titles, but the authors usually escape this sort of interference because the distribution network - i.e. the hundreds of online Flash portals - is too complex to aim a threat at. But when similar games appear on well-known platforms, copyright holders instantly perk up.
Is this good or bad news for App Store and Facebook? While the bashing of bedroom coders is not exactly a PR triumph, it could stop these burgeoning platforms from becoming repositories of retro rip-offs. Original games don't attract the litigious attentions of large companies.
