by Andrew Redfern @ 16th December 2008 12:36 pm

A post on the AllFacebook blog is reporting that the battle between Hasbro, owners of Scrabble and RJ Softwares the company behind the massively popular Scrabulous Facebook application has finally been settled after Hasbro dropped their lawsuit yesterday.

It seems that Hasbro are now satisified that the re-launched version of Scrabulous, Wordscraper, is now no longer a significant threat to them after the lastest figures showed Wordscraper usage relatively flat around thr 200,000 mark whilst uptake of Hasbro’s official Scrabble applications (one for the US & Canada and one for the rest of the world) growing strongly at 420,000 and 270,000 respectively.

So whilst the original problem hasn’t gone away it seems Hasbro is taking the line that Wordscraper is not taking Scrabble’s place in the market.

This is a long running saga that began rumbling at the start fo the year and looked headed inevitably towards the courts. It’s clear that both parties were anxious to avoid this and so this looks to be the best solution all round. The resulting court battle could have been a long and complex one after RJ Softwares relaunched a changed version of the Scrabulous that removed a lot of the Scrabble-like features.

Wordscraper still remains popular but nowhere near the levels achieved by it’s predecessor which had over 800,000 users. The official Scrabble applications combined will soon be approaching that and so it would seem the problem has gone away almost organically.

This will be a relief for Facebook who, from the outset, tried to distance itself from the wrangle whilst still adhering to it’s legal requirements.

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