The Scrabulous Facebook game in the NYT spotlight

scrab.jpgEver since Scrabulous was created by a couple of brothers in India, it has been a hot property on Facebook with more than 700,000 players a day. But Hasbro hasn’t taken kindly to the rip-off of its Scrabble property and has sued to remove the game from the fast-growing social network. Electronic Arts and Real Networks are moving to deploy their own online Scrabble games under license from Hasbro. But fans of Scrabulous are angry that their game might get pulled. The New York Times has an interesting story today on the brothers and the legal controversy.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.