An official version of Scrabble is headed for Facebook. So could this be the end of the massively popular Scrabulous? Or just the start of another long and drawn-out legal battle?

Scrabulous is one of the most active and loved applications on the social network, Facebook. However, in both name and appearance it is clearly based on the classic board game, Scrabble, and that right there is a problem. Up until now, an officially licensed version of the word game hasn’t been available as an alternative for players in North America, so Scrabulous has survived. But now that an official Scrabble game is headed for Facebook, what does the future hold for Scrabulous?

This saga over a social network application of a board game has been going on for a while now. January of this year saw EA, Hasbro and Mattel, the joint owners of Scrabble, try to legally force the developers of Scrabulous to remove the game from Facebook. Cease and desist letters went out, but the removal date came and went, and nothing much happened. To this day, Scrabulous still exists on Facebook.

Instead of carrying on the potentially expensive, and fan-annoying legal fight, EA, Hasbro and Mattel first decided to offer an official alternative. Real Networks created an official version of the game for Mattel, who owns the rights outside of North America, back in April, and now EA has done the same for the US and Canada.

The new application has already launched at Pogo.com, and will be coming to Facebook by the end of the month. But there’s absolutely no guarantee that Scrabulous fans will suddenly switch allegiances. In fact, the lack of success that Mattel has seen with its version, which CNET claims is 100 times less popular than Scrabulous, suggests that EA and Hasbro are likely to fail in their vision for everyone to suddenly desert Scrabulous.

I can only imagine that this will cause the copyright holders to restart their legal challenge to the makers of Scrabulous, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla of Calcutta, India. Only now they will have the moral high ground of having already offered an alternative to Scrabble fans, so no-one will be left high and dry.

The only problem is that the official version of the game doesn’t seem, on first view, as user-friendly or as well-designed as Scrabulous. Those shared licensing deals mean that people in the US and Canada will only be able to play other people in the same territory. So if you have a friend in London who you regularly play Scrabulous with, the new Scrabble app will be an immediate turn off.

Scrabulous is just so well-positioned, and immediately accessible to all that I can’t see EA’s Scrabble gaining traction any time soon. Unless of course, Scrabulous disappears.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 3:46 pm under Internet, Legal, Opinion.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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