VentureBeat

Updated

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s grandmother must be sad right now. Scrabulous, a Facebook application closely patterned after Hasbro-made word game Scrabble, has shut itself down in the U.S. and Canada as it faces a Hasbro lawsuit. The application has more than half a million daily active users — including Zuckerberg, who has said that he enjoys playing it with his grandmother.

The Calcutta-based brothers who created the application, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla (pictured), were first threatened with legal action by Hasbro back in January, when the game maker sent a legal take-down notice to Facebook. Then, Hasbro had a plan of its own for taking advantage of the game’s popularity. It had licensed the game to Electronic Arts back in October, which led to an application that today is experiencing technical difficulties [Update: Due to hackers, the LA Time reports], and has a trifling 15,000 daily active users.

Last week, the brothers Agarwalla were sued directly by Hasbro. Today, here’s what the brothers tell us:

Facebook has informed us that they have received a legal notice from Hasbro in reference to the Scrabulous application. In deference to Facebook’s concerns and without prejudice to our legal rights, we have had to restrict our fans in USA and Canada from accessing the Scrabulous application on Facebook until further notice. This is an unfortunate event and not something that we are very pleased about, especially as Mattel has been pursuing the matter in Indian courts for the past few months. We will sincerely hope to bring to our fans brighter news in the days to come.

So depending on what happens with the lawsuit and with the Mattel case in India, Scrabulous may not be dead yet. Mattel, for what it’s worth, also has its own version of Scrabble on Facebook, with less than 10,000 daily active users.

Dean Takahashi contributed reporting to this article.

[Photo via the BBC.]

LOS ANGELES—With the influx of fresh new gamers, thanks in large part to the popularity of mass-market game machines, the DS and the Wii, more game companies than ever are jumping on the girl gamer bandwagon. Practically every booth at this year’s E3 Media and Business Summit this year had something to offer for female gamers of various demographics.

The breadth of games ranged from Nintendo DS titles like Namco Bandai’s “National Geographic Panda” and Legacy Interactive’s “Zoo Vet Endangered Animals” to Wii titles like Electronic Arts’ “Littlest Pet Shop” (pictured above, also available on Nintendo DS) and “Boogie: Superstar.”

“We discovered with the original ‘Boogie’ that tween girls really loved the game, so we decided to focus on girls 10 to 14 years of age with this sequel,” said Charles-William Bibaud, associate producer for the game. “We worked with a local tween author and a choreographer to make sure this game has everything a tween wants, including lots of customization and the ability to use real dance moves with the Wii.”

Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, said at Nintendo’s E3 press event that 48 percent of Nintendo DS owners are now female gamers. And that number is huge given the fact that Nintendo has sold over 70 million Nintendo DS portables worldwide (as of the end of March). Factor in that the company forecasts a global installed base of 100 million Nintendo DS units by the end of March 2009, and there is clearly a new market for game publishers and developers to target. Read the rest of this entry »

Electronic Arts has taken many months to get its official Hasbro-licensed version of Scrabble onto the Web at Pogo.com and Facebook, but it’s launching the Pogo.com version today and will have the Facebook version out later this month. In the meantime, an unlicensed version of Scrabble created by Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla of Calcutta, India, has been up on Facebook for months getting a giant head start.

The two brothers behind the unofficial version, Scrabulous, are apparently making $25,000 a month from ad revenue, but no doubt they’re going to have to pay a lot back in legal fees. Hasbro sent a take-down notice to Facebook back in January. But Facebook hasn’t taken the turn-based game down yet. The brothers were reportedly trying to sell Scrabulous, but the price was too high.

Scrabble will be the first EA-Hasbro licensed property to go live on a social networking site. It’s late, but at least EA is finally getting into one of the hottest areas of games: the convergence of online gaming and social networking.

EA Scrabble is already available on a variety of mobile phones and on the Apple iPod. EA says the Facebook version has an intuitive interface that allows head-to-head challenges with friends, family and other Facebook users in the U.S. and Canada. There are flexible speed levels and word lists for help choosing words. EA will also let users chat and enjoy dynamic animations. The latter is a feature that Scrabulous doesn’t have.

Mattel and Real Networks have the overseas rights to Scrabulous. Real Networks launched a version of Scrabble, dubbed “Scrabble by Mattel,” in April on Facebook outside the U.S. and Canada. Reports at the time showed that the Mattel-Real Networks version had very little traction.

EA struck its broad licensing deal with Hasbro last October under which EA will make games based on Hasbro’s properties. That puts the official version far behind Scrabulous, which launched in 2006 and still ranks No. 9 on the most-active Facebook applications with 451,107 active daily users.

Gary Serby, a spokesman for Hasbro, said in a statement, “Hasbro has been consistent in stating that Scrabulous infringes upon our intellectual property, and we are keeping our legal options open. Today we are focusing on the coming launch of EA’s legitimate social networking version of Scrabble. We have no further comment.”