Hasbro today announced that it has dropped its lawsuit against the makers of Scrabulous, the popular Facebook Scrabble clone that was forced to shut down earlier this year. Scrabulous later reappeared as Wordscraper, a reimagined version of Scrabble, but this app was decisively less popular than the original. Hasbro’s own Scrabble game on Facebook also never quite caught on with the old Scrabulous fan base.
It is not clear why Hasbro decided to drop the lawsuit, but chances are that Hasbro got all it wanted, as the developers made substantial changes to both Wordscraper and Lexulous, the stand-alone version of Wordscaper.
According to Hasbro, this agreement also “provides people in the U.S. and Canada with a choice of different games and also avoids potentially lengthy and costly litigation.”
However, most users really liked the old Scrabulous and preferred it over Hasbro’s own alternative, though according to AllFacebook, Hasbro’s version is slowly picking up more users now. Hasbro’s Scrabble app is currently rated 1.3 out of 5 on Facebook.
Thanks to this agreement, neither Hasbro nor Scrabulous’ developers, RJ Software, have to face a long and expensive legal battle, and RJ Software can still offer Wordscraper and Lexulous.
