Facebook Scrabble is Here, Sort Of

In its war against Scrabulous, Mattel is fighting back with the best ammunition it has: the game of Scrabble.

Gamehouse, a division of RealNetworks, launched a beta version of "Scrabble by Mattel" for Facebook in March. There's a catch, of course. Mattel owns the rights to Scrabble outside of the U.S. and Canada, so Scrabble players stateside will have to continue playing Scrabulous for now.

Hasbro, which owns the rights to market Scrabble in the U.S., is working on its own Facebook versions of the game with both RealNetworks and Electronic Arts.

Earlier this year, both Hasbro and Mattel threatened legal action against the two developers of the popular Scrabulous, which has used up more worker productivity hours in recent months than perhaps any other online game. It boasts more than 600,000 active users today.

So far, the new Scrabble doesn't seem to have quite the following of Scrabulous. It has fewer than 2,000 active users, and many reviews are less than glowing. Frustrated users find their games have mysteriously disappeared and application itself is slow to load. On the positive side, Scrabble diehards will be happy to know that this version lets the users decide whether a word is valid or not. Scrabulous decides that for you, taking some of the fun out of the game.

What does this all mean for Scrabulous fans? The game will likely live on, but the brothers who developed it may not end up with the result they'd hoped for.

Last month, Silicon Alley Insider reported that the gaming companies were in talks to resolve their dispute with the brothers, but money has kept the two sides apart. The Scrabulous developers earn about $300,000 per year in revenue from ads on the application, but they reportedly want several tens of million of dollars for their project. The gaming companies think their price tag is ridiculous.

RealNetworks, which also is behind the Scrabulous application, was thought to be a potential buyer of the game, an outcome with seems unlikely now.

by Megan Barnett