SCRABULOUS, once one of the Web's most popular games, has returned to Facebook with a new name and new rules, but is now scrambling to re-establish itself.
Renamed Lexulous, the game was taken off Facebook and other websites last September, after its creators were taken to court. At its peak, Scrabulous had four million registered users worldwide. The new game, however, has only managed to draw 300,000 users since being relaunched on Jan 1.
About 15,000 of the current Lexulous players are from Singapore, a sharp drop from the more than 150,000 who used to play Scrabulous.
Competition from similar games - both official and unofficial - has hit Lexulous hard. For instance, the two official Scrabble games on Facebook - one for people within the United States and Canada, and the other for the rest of the world - are drawing in players. The two versions, by Scrabble creator Hasbro, have over 800,000 users in all.
Portals like AOL and Yahoo! also offer games that resemble Scrabble, including Word Mojo Gold or Scrabble Blast. Housewife and freelance writer Sandra Chua, 48, who said she was 'addicted' to Scrabulous, does not like the new version.
'It's not as much fun. Perhaps we are creatures of habit and used to the old rules,' she said.
She has found another online word game to play since Scrabulous disappeared from the Web.
Changes made to the new game include giving players eight tiles instead of seven.
Responding to The Straits Times via e-mail, Mr Jayant Agarwalla, one of the creators of Scrabulous, said he was confident the new game would draw more users over time. Scrabulous was created and launched as an online game in 2005 by Mr Jayant and his brother, Rajat, who are Indian nationals.
It was added as an application on Facebook two years later, and quickly became the most popular game there. Hasbro, which owns the North American rights to the game, took the brothers to court for copyright infringement last year.
It dropped the suit last month after the brothers agreed to make changes to the game, in particular dropping the name, which was deemed too similar to Hasbro's board game Scrabble.
When contacted about the new version, a Facebook spokesman said the application now fits its terms, 'which require developers to own the intellectual property for the applications they build'.
This story was first published in The Straits Times on 21 January 2009.
