EA Goes Live With Scrabble on Facebook for U.S. and Canada; Get Your Q’s and Z’s Ready!

For all of you looking for a triple-word score, rejoice! Scrabble is now officially on Facebook in the U.S. and in Canada. SCRABBLE from EA on Facebook Platform will be the first EA Hasbro-licensed property to go live on a social networking site. Scrabble is a very complicated game – not just on the board but with regards to the property rights as well.

Update: I can’t find Scrabble on Facebook as of yet. Perhaps EA and Mattel shouldn’t put out press releases until said game is live?

Jordan over at Marketing Pilgrim has a look from April into who owns what. Basically Mattel owns the Scrabble rights outside the U.S. and Canada and they launched a Facebook version in April. Today’s announcement brings Scrabble to the worldwide Facebook audience. What’s silly is that two development teams built the same game – what a waste of company resources.

Back in January, Erick looked at Scrabulous and how the Facebook community came together to attempt to save the game. He noted that the  “Save Scrabulous” group has over 46,000 Facebook members.

Amit has a good look at how Scrabulous developers Jayant Agarwalla and Rajat Agarwalla, monetize their casual game using Google AdSense to the tune of $20,000 a month. Today’s announcement certainly will hurt – to what extent is still unknown.

EA and Mattel have also announced that Scrabble is available on the Pogo games network. The Pogo version will have additional hidden features that aren’t available in the Facebook version.

In case you are wondering how some tech blogs would do in Scrabble, here you go:

• SiliconAlleyInsider – 25 
• CenterNetworks – 23
• TechCrunch – 22
• Readwriteweb – 21
• Inquisitr – 18 (got the big Q but nothing else to boost)
• Venturebeat – 16
• Mashable – 15
• Webware – 14
• Profy – 13
• Gigaom – 10

(yes i get that the sites all have a different number of letters, just smile geez)