Hasbro wants to shut down popular Facebook app Scrabulous @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on January 17, 2008

News: The Scrabble clone might not be long for this world.

Scrabulous is an online clone of the popular board game Scrabble. The game was started in 2006 by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two brothers who live in India. In 2007, they turned the game into a Facebook application and it has quickly overtaken the site. Over 2.3 million people have installed the app on their profile and over 600,000 log in and play every day.

But all that might come to an end as Hasbro, the company that owns the rights to Scrabble, has sent letters to Facebook and Scrabulous.com asking that the game be shut down.

This is not surprising, as Scrabulous is an exact replica of Scrabble. Hasbro also signed a deal with Electronic Arts in August to create digital versions of many of their board games, including Scrabble.

Hasbro and Facebook are currently looking into a solution, but as of today Scrabulous is still available on the site. If the company were smart, they (or EA for that matter) would buy out the game and rebrand it "Scrabble: The Official Online Game." Beyond changing the logo, no work would be required on the part of Hasbro as, again, Scrabulous is an exact replica of Scrabble. The Agarwalla brothers have already done the heavy lifting by designing and coding the game and by gathering a ton of users. Hasbro would be foolish to throw all that away and start from scratch (not to mention the ill will they'd garner in the Scrabulous community).

For their part, the Facebook community has taken steps to keep their favorite game alive including starting an online petition and creating a "Save Scrabulous" group which currently has 18,000 members (with more signing up every minute).

We'll have more on the Hasbro/Scrabulous conflict soon. And this recent Scrabulous convert will be watching the news very closely.