Does new Facebook Scrabble spell trouble for Scrabulous?

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 8 Apr 2008 at 08:57

Having conspicuously failed to have its infamous imitator thrown off of Facebook, Mattel is literally attempting to beat Scrabulous at its own game with the launch of an official Scrabble application.

Mattel and Scrabble's US rights holder, Hasbro, reportedly asked Facebook to remove the Scrabulous application from its site last year, claiming trademark infringement.

Facebook has consistently refused to comment on the matter and the game still remains on the social networking site today, with 629,256 daily users according to the site's stats.

News that the Mattel and Hasbro were attempting to have Scrabulous shut down met with protests from thousands of Facebook users.

Now Mattel's decided to fight back with the launch of its own official Scrabble application, in association with RealNetworks.

The official game certainly has the graphical edge on its bootleg rival, with a more authentic-looking board and snazzy animations when a word is played on a double-word tile, for example. However, such graphical showboating comes at the cost of load times, with the board taking as long as 15 seconds to appear in our brief tests.

Naturally, the game play is almost identical, conforming to the normal rules of Scrabble. The now obligatory option to cheat and look up words in the online dictionary is carried over from Scrabulous, as is the option to review a list of two-letter words.

It's questionable whether the official game offers enough to tempt Scrabulous players to desert one of Facebook's most popular applications - especially seeing US players are banned because of the split rights issue.

But if Mattel's version fails to dent Scrabulous's popularity, Facebook may once again be hearing from the company's lawyers.