The Hasbro Toy Shop Introduces *New* Games by Zynga! Only... Not Really....
And in at least one case, what they mean by "new" is "we changed the name" and pretended this concept never existed prior to Facebook or your iPhone.
Check this out. Seriously. This was e-mailed to me today.
Dear Zynga,
This is NOT a new game. It's been around for decades. We old people call it "Scrabble." There's a picture of me "playing" it in 1980 on the floor of my parents' living room. It was old then. It was also distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Hasbro, so Hasbro really needs to drop the façade.
Look, I don't mind that you want to make Farmville into a board game (seriously) and keep a cash cow going; but please don't try to act like "Words With Friends" is something none of us have ever seen in board game format. Heck, it has even been in digital format before you came along.
Sincerely,
The World
Posts
09 October, 2012 16:26
Could be worse. I thought for sure that Scrabble was Milton-Bradley? At least this is just Hasbro insulting our intelligence instead of violating someone else's copyright. :-P
09 October, 2012 16:32
I actually Googled/Wikipediaed it (don't have my Scrabble game around me), otherwise I wouldn't have known it was Hasbro either. But I guess you're right--insulting our intelligence is a lot better than copyright infringement. And I'm sure it will pay off for them. There's probably some 16-year old out there who is going to be SO excited that she can finally play WWF the Board Game.