Inside Social Games

Not too long ago, a legal skirmish between the creators of Scrabulous, Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, and game-maker, Hasbro, ultimately led to the voluntary shut down of the Facebook application. The suit centered around Hasbro’s intellectual property rights, as the app was claimed to too closely resemble the popular board game Scrabble. Nonetheless, the Agarwallas brought Scrabulous back as Lexulous, and ironically the game has been quickly nipping at the heels of Hasbro and Mattel’s official Scrabble apps.

It’s a little confusing, but there are now two versions of the official Scrabble game. Hasbro owns the rights for the U.S. and Canada (which is built by Electronic Arts and dubbed “Scrabble Beta”), and Mattel owns SCRABBLE® Worldwide. The former currently has about 600,000 active users per month, while the latter around 370,000. However, neither is as popular as Scrabulous once was. The geographic split has certainly hindered both games.

On the flipside, however, Lexulous has been growing rapidly since its rebirth late last year with approximately 570,000 active monthly users. The game is still growing, and  it does not geographically isolate players. Furthermore, Lexulous also made use of Facebook’s new communication features such as the chat invite system, allowing you to send game invites to anyone logged into the chat service at that time.

The biggest irony of this whole situation is that Hasbro and Mattel actually looked into buying out Scrabulous before the suit. At that time, the app was receiving 500,000+ users a day. Long story short, Lexulous continues to rise as both Scrabble apps struggle along.