Game Stooge

EA Launches Scrabble on Pogo and Facebook

• Scribbled on July 8th, 2008 by Derrick Schommer
• Filed in Editorial Content, Facebook, Puzzle

Time to take advantage of the social networking world and release Scrabble on Pogo.com, not so surprising, and Facebook for social networking glory.

This comes, of course, a few months after Hasbro attempted to knock Scrabulous offline as a Facebook application because it wasn’t a licensed version of the game design in which Hasbro owns. Scrabulous is still present on Facebook and fans love it, now Scrabble arrives to take back all the glory…

…or will it?

(Click “Read more”… for the rest of the editorial.)

Do we need yet another Scrabble Facebook application even if it is the real one? In the world of social networking the reason why certain features and applications take off and become viral is a mystery. Nobody knew a Scrabble-style game would be a huge hit with Facebook fans but so be it. Now, Hasbro/EA will compete against a clone on the great social networking site where many facebookers are plenty happy with what they have–isn’t more better?

Unless Scrabble offers some really cool reasons to switch, Scrabulous will probably maintain the lead as Facebook folks won’t need to install yet another app into their profile to play a game that…they’re already playing anyway. The only way to clearly win this battle is to force Scrabulous off of Facebook because of its blatant violation of license, but that hasn’t worked yet.

We’d not be surprised to see Scrabulous fans shun the original game based purely on their initial forceful attack on Scrabulous with legal weapons. Rather than embracing the title and perhaps supporting/buying them they’re trying to replace the product with a like system and say “this is how it’s supposed to be done.”

Really? Does anyone really care? In terms of Facebook apps the real scrabble is simply a clone of Scrabulous, no?

(Thanks, Joystiq.)