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Scrabuluos Relaunches As Wordscraper

By Madhav A Chanchani

  • 14 Aug 2008

Kolkata-based brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, have relaunched Scrabuluos under a new Facebook application name called Wordscraper. On Tuesday, Scrabuluos was pulled off from the US and Canadian Facebook pages due to the lawsuit filed by gaming company Hasbro, which owns the rights for the game. Wordscraper has 15,000 users.

The Agarwalla brothers have changed the name, changed the look of the board (instead of squares there are circles) and have also added some new rules. You also have the option to customise the supplied Wordscraper board to make it identical to a Scrabble board. This way the brothers can avoid getting sued for copyright infringement and can also keep their fans happy. When the application was pulled off on Tuesday, the Agrawalla Brothers had said in a release that they sincerely hope to bring their fans brighter news in the days to come. This they seem to have done now.

At the time when Scrabuluos was pulled off Facebok, it had around 500,000 daily users. The new application at this time only has only around 15,000 users till now, while the offical version (by EA and Hasbro) has increased its users to 63,000 from 15,000 daily users earlier this week. The users of Wordscraper should increase because Scrabuluos had huge fanbase among Facebook users. Also, Scrabuluos is still available to everyone outside of US and Canada, where Hasbro’s rights do not apply.

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Scrabulous Increasing Popularity

Scrabuluos at its peak reached 5 million users per month and the owners earned $25,000 per week from the ad revenues generated by the application. It was pulled of as game-making giant Hasbro filed a lawsuit against the company formed by the brothers, called RJ Softwares, on July 25. Electronic Arts, with consent of Hasbro had released its version of Scrabble for American and Canadian Facebook users. Mattel, which holds the rights to Scrabble outside North America, has also filed a suit against Scrabuluos in a case awaiting resolution. In an attempt to save the game New York-based Jason Madhosingh formed a group called Save Scrabuluos, which now has more than 47,000 members. More than 50 such groups were formed on Facebook.

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