Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

About a year too late, Electronic Arts and Hasbro have released an official version of Scrabble as a Facebook app for users in the United States and Canada. An international version was released by Mattel/Real Networks in April, and sports a not-so impressive 5,643 users.

In comparison, Scrabulous, which was subject to a take-down notice sent to Facebook in January, has 450,000 daily active users. The founders, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla of Calcutta, India, are raking in about $25,000 in ad revenue a month. They’ve tried to sell Scrabulous, but haven’t had any success as the price they are asking is too high for any potential bidders.

But in spite of the take-down notice, Scrabulous has lived on and continues to feed off the inevitable relationship between social networking and casual gaming. Casual gaming apps have already proven to be amongst the most popular on Facebook, especially among advertisers, largely due to the fact that users often spend large amount of times using the app, whereas other apps only take a few minutes every week or so. It’s a lot easier to attract ad buys when there is a highly engaged group of users, and Scrabulous definitely has that.

I know a few very dedicated Scrabble fans (it’s big in New York) and they’re not going to quit Scrabulous, something they and all their friends are familar with, just to pick up the “official” version. While the EA/Hasbro version does have some cool features like chat, word lists, and animations, the hardcore daily Scrabble fans that are used to Scrabulous aren’t about to give it up.

So should Hasbro choose to buy off the Scrabulous guys? Unless they can get Scrabulous taken down, that’s probably the only way they’re going to have their name on the top Scrabble app on Facebook. They would prefer for Facebook to remove Scrabulous and corner the market, but it hasn’t happened yet, while time and valuable ad dollars tick away.  Quite a quandary we have here, don’t you think?

Thanks to Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat for the story.

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