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Hasbro and EA announced today that the two companies will soon launch an official version of Scrabble on Facebook. Interestingly, their press release makes no mention of Scrabulous, although it does mention “the current interest in Scrabble for social networking”.
So will the creators of Scrabulous (the Agarwalla brothers) be quaking in their boots that everyone will migrate away to the official game? Probably not. For one, there is already an official version of Scrabble on Facebook for users outside North America (licensed by Mattel, the owners of Scrabble outside of the US and Canada, and produced by RealNetworks). It currently has less than 6,000 daily active users, compared to Scrabulous with just over 450,000. This version has been out since late March and has shown little growth since then.
Now there will be two official versions of Scrabble on Facebook, with Hasbro owning the rights in North America, and Mattel in the rest of the world. Try to play a game of the new EA Scrabble in the US with someone in the UK (e.g. me) and you won’t be able. Somehow, I just can’t see how making the game “official” is going to take traffic away from the well-established Scrabulous.
This is one of the clearest examples of how older, bigger companies are struggling to meet the needs of social media. Scrabble’s geographical licensing issues currently seem to be hurting the companies involved more than the consumers. The length of time it has taken EA to develop the official Scrabble shows that older companies are not set up to operate as quickly as independent Facebook application and game developers. And as Jeremiah Owyang has previously written, brands are often risk-averse and too slow-moving to capitalize on the current social media opportunity.
We’ll see if the launch of the official versions of Scrabble cause Scrabulous’s earlier legal issues to re-emerge. If EA’s version flounders as RealNetworks’ has, it would not be too surprising if one day we were to log on to Scrabulous and be redirected to one of the official, geographically hobbled versions of one of our favourite board games.
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July 7th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
[...] > Read the full story at Inside Facebook digg_skin = ‘compact’; digg_bgcolor = ‘#000000′; Bookmark This [...]
July 15th, 2008 at 4:32 am
Scrabble was a fun game and scrabble on social networks was even more fun …
But i find it a bit painful to see lack of innovation around word games…… looks like atleast in word games we want to stick with the old ……
Atleast some guys innovated …and i found a totally new word game concept ..Its called Navajo …..developed by ex-IITians
Amazing game and highly addictive …
here;s the link
http://www.facebook.com/add.php?api_key=26391705b7b6e5f3f2d8b23bc55bf792
July 15th, 2008 at 5:50 am
totally agree ….
funny how much graphics the new scrabble app carried …..
If i were at EA, i’d first remind them that Fbook is known fr simplicity and less graphics …
then u build an app that is so graphics intensive, almost as if designer was on steroids …id fire da PM fr the app ….
At the same time …it takes months fr EA to make a simple app and here’s Navajo a complicated app but done so simply ….
kudos
http://www.facebook.com/add.php?api_key=26391705b7b6e5f3f2d8b23bc55bf792
July 16th, 2008 at 3:38 am
[...] Markt als enorm heiß und vielversprechend einschätzen, denn auch etablierte Gamesproduzenten (EA mit ihrem Scrabble ist da ein schönes Beispiel, weitere stehen aber bereits in den Startlöchern) werden zukünftig verstärke auf soziale [...]
September 16th, 2008 at 3:15 am
[...] - bookmarked by 4 members originally found by martijnaslander on 2008-08-23 It’s Official – You’ll Soon be Able to Play Scrabble on Facebook [...]