Facebook, the world’s fastest growing web community, is under pressure from Mattel and Hasbro to close the Scrabulous game down. Scrabulous is a game “application” on Facebook, which allows friends to play scrabble with each other online, within the Facebook social pages. Facebook encourages its users to write interesting applications. Scrabulous currently has 603,014 daily active users on Facebook.
Scrabulous was developed by Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla from India, and has proved to be an extremely popular online game on Facebook, competing with other games such as Pirates, Jetman and Battleships. However, the makers of the original board game, Scrabble, are trying to get the Scrabulous game closed, due to infringement of copyright.
However, on January 11, 2008, Mattel and Hasbro sent a cease and desist letter to Facebook to get the application removed.
A group called Save Scrabulous was started on Facebook a few days ago to petition against closure, and already has over 13,000 members. Many Scrabulous fans are calling for a collaboration between Scrabulous and Mattell and Hasbro, rather than a closure.
Will Scrabulous be saved? Will Mattel and Hasbro work together with Scrabulous? This situation should be noted by other board game manufacturers. Move with the times and produce accessible electronic, online, versions of your games, or see other people reap the rewards. Mattel and Hasbro are probably kicking themselves for not thinking of building Facebook versions of all their games in the first place.
