Will RealNetworks End Up Buying Scrabulous?
By Rafat Ali - Sun 02 Mar 2008 03:24 PM PST
I had the exact same thought that Om had after I read the NYT piece last night AND when RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK) PR sent out a note about the story, explaining their neutral position in the copyright controversy over the crazily popular Facebook app.
Scrabulous is the new Tetris. The game, which claims to attract more than 700,000 daily players, was created last year by Kolkata, India-based brothers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla. But it didn’t take off until it was added to Facebook a few months ago, where it quickly became one of the top 10 apps. Negotiations have been going on between Hasbro and Mattel (joint owners of Scrabble right) on one hand; and Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) and RealNetworks on the other hand (joint owners of digital rights), and the two brothers.
While Hasbro and Mattel have taken legal action against the two brothers trying to shut down the app for copyright violation, some have speculated that the app might be sold to EA, who owns the online rights. RealNetworks sits somewhere in the middle, and has the join online rights as well...in fact it has been selling the online Scrabble version on RealArcade.com for more than a year
According to Bill Hankes, VP of corp comm at RNWK, “We have been actively working with Rajat and Jayant for a couple of months to join forces in order to save Scrabulous. Because Real is the only games company that has licenses from both Hasbro and Mattel, we are in a unique position to bring all the parties together in an effort to preserve the Scrabble experience for millions of Scrabulous fans.” When I pressed further on whether Real could buy the app and then negotiate with all the parties, he said: “Not sure how we’ll end up working with Scrabulous, but we think we’re in a position to help because we already have rights.”
Real of course has been building up its casual gaming creds for the last few years, with acquisitions in both online and mobile gaming side of the business. It has bought companies like GameTrust and Trymedia on the online side, and a few mobile gaming companies in Europe in the last few years. With Scrabulous as a platform, the company could leverage into the distributed casual gaming market.
Posted in:
Tags: scrabulous, realnetworks,
