Facebook members were already playing a knock off of the game called Scrabulous which was developed by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two brothers from Calcutta.

Hasbro and Electronic Arts debuted their Facebook Scrabble game yesterday and it’s currently running in closed Beta mode, open only by invite. The game will be open to all Facebook members later this month.

Mark Blecher, general manager of Hasbro Digital Media and Gaming said:
“We did make a request of Facebook and, at the time, we recognized that there was an enormous number of people who wanted to play the official version of Scrabble but did not have that opportunity, so we decided we needed to get our product out there.”

Scrabulous is already being played by thousands of members there and the transition to the official Scrabble game could be tricky, since a lot of them are comfortable with the Scrabulous format and have running games with friends there.

Hasbro is considering legal options and insists that Scrabulous is an infringement of the company’s intellectual property.