“Next year, we decided to launch our own free scrabble site. It was to help the gaming community,” says Jayant. Rajat and Jayant claim that they contacted Hasbro about collaborating on the game but received no response. It it worth noting that it has taken the toy giants rather a long time to react to the game, despite its high profile and obvious similarity (it’s exactly the same) to Scrabble.

Brands dream of getting this kind of traction online — and Scrabulous has arguably caused a generation to fall in love with Scrabble all over again. If Hasbro and Mattel succeed in having the game removed — rather than entering into talks with the developers — they will have scored a spectacular own goal. A Save Scrabulous group is already ablaze with Facebookers commenting on their shortsightedness – it currently has 6,000 members and counting. Of course Mattel and Hasbro are going to create their own version. But why not just piggy-back on what’s already there, and reap the benefits? Hasbro and Mattel have an opportunity here to engage properly with social media and look like good guys. Let’s hope they don’t blow it.

Source: BBC.

UPDATE: following widespread reporting in the press, the Save Scrabulous group had ballooned overnight to 28,000+ ….

If you click the TMX tag things start to get a little sinister. YouTube should look into getting a link straight through to TMX Elmo – 10 Year Anniversary on Amazon…

With thanks to Andrew who is clearly Very Busy.