In The New York Times, Heather Timmons reports from New Delhi on the Scrabulous craze. The Calcutta-based creators of the game collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising.
The latest bane of office productivity is Scrabulous, a virtual knockoff of the Scrabble board game, with over 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users.
Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once. Everyone seems to love the online game – everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.
In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company. Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game.
Similar Posts:
- Scrabulous debate may rewrite the rules of the game
- Scrabulous may be fabulous. But its creators face legal action
- In the making: The other Indian Monopoly
- India bans “sexy housewife” porn site
- US media see a path to India in China’s snub
The world of gaming is changing so quickly with the internet and the birth of the online game