Scrabulous founders launch new game

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 1 Aug 2008 at 07:16

The duo behind the recently shut-down Scrabulous have launched a new application on Facebook, which bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor.

Scrabulous was removed from Facebook earlier this week due to a complaint from the owners of the Scrabble brand in North America, Hasbro, that it infringed on the copyright for the game. The company also filed a copyright lawsuit against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the two Indian programmers who created the application.

However, the game is still available to play in the UK, where the rights to scrabble are owned by another company, Mattel.

Until it was removed, the application was a huge phenomenon on the social networking site, attracting half a million daily users. The founders admitted that even as long ago as January they were making over $25,000 a month from advertising revenue alone.

The new game, called Wordscraper, is another word game in which players have to construct words from a set of seven tiles. Points are scored based on which letters are used, and bonus points can be won by placing tiles on certain squares.

Although it resembles Scrabble, there is no mention of the trademark anywhere in the application or its documentation.

As the copyright for Scrabble covers only the brand, and not the concept of the game, the founders of Wordscraper may escape any future lawsuits.

"We're putting finishing touches to Wordscraper, it will only get better," says a message on the new application's homepage.

Two games are offered, one called Wordscraper Blitz which is played in real-time, and Wordscraper Regular which acts much like the previous Scrabulous application.