Popular Facebook casual game under fire for infringing Scrabble copyright
Some players in the casual space often bemoan that the market is flooded with clones, but one of 2007s most popular games that also happens to be a clone - a free to play interpretation of Hasbro's Scrabble word game playable through Facebook - is being threatened with closure.
Scrabulous, which has registrered 2.3m active users since becoming available in 2006, was created by two brothers from Calcutta and has become a popular app on the social networking site.
Taking Hasbro's Scrabble game as a template has helped win over casual players but also attracted legal eagles - the toy firm wants the game shut down.
“They sent a notice to Facebook about two weeks ago,” one of the sibling developers, 21 year old Jayant Agarwalla, told Fortune. “The lawyers are working on it.”
Agarwalla added that he's hoping to reach some kind of compromise with Hasbro, but added that the game isn't the huge money spinner some may think, only generating some $25,000 a month from web advertising from Facebook.
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Hasbro recently licensed the interactive rights to its casual board game properties to Electronic Arts.
I used to play scrabble online, years ago (like 10-12 years circa 1994-1996). It was a good game developed by university students, and I forget what university sorry. But Hasbro found out it was a free version being played by students and adults all over the world. It did not take them long after their lawyers found out, like a couple months. And then the host site was eventually closed.
