The two companies just announced the agreement, which give Hasbro the license to create and distribute “wide ranging product lines based on Zynga’s game brands.” This means toys, games, and other real life products based on Zynga’s massive catalog of online games.

I know what you’re thinking – does this mean that a Words With Friends board game is a possibility? You know, Scrabble?

“It’s exciting to partner with Hasbro as we share a common vision for play and a mission to connect the world through games,” said Mark Pincus, founder, CEO and chief product officer of Zynga. “This partnership is so special because it represents an exciting leap forward in enabling people to connect their virtual and real worlds. Hasbro has inspired play through their famous toys, games and action figures and we look forward to working with a company that continually creates meaningful and fun brands.”

Hasbro is looking to benefit from Zynga’s 200+ million monthly active users.

“Hasbro is thrilled to have the opportunity to bring Zynga’s immensely popular social games to life in a variety of creative and new expressions that reflect consumers’ growing desire to surround themselves with gaming brands they love anytime, anywhere together with their friends and family,” said Brian Goldner, President and CEO of Hasbro. “Zynga is bringing more games to mainstream culture and is redefining how people play. At Hasbro, we’re proud to help bring their games to even more people around the world. This strategic alliance plays off of both Hasbro’s and Zynga’s proven strengths and is emblematic of the new innovations and new platforms we are creating across our entire gaming portfolio.”

The deal also leaves open the possibility for co-branded ventures – My Little Pony on The Pioneer Trial, anyone?

The first products are expected to roll off the production line sometime in the Fall of this year.

Zynga has taken a little flak recently for a series of accusations that they were stealing from indie game developers. They later came out and defended their development strategy.

If you want to really grasp just how huge Zynga is on the social gaming sphere, just think about this: In their IPO filings, Facebook revealed that Zynga accounted for 12% of their total revenue last year.

Original Article: Tomorrow (September 9), a giant worldwide game of Monopoly will commence, using the real world. That is, the real world on Google Maps. Hasbro, the creators of the classic board game, are launching the game called, "Monopoly City Streets," in which players will fight for the largest empire in the world.

The official site for the game offers the following description:

A live worldwide game of MONOPOLY using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence.

Own any street in the world. Build humble houses, crazy castles and stupendous skyscrapers to collect rent. Use MONOPOLY Chance Cards to sabotage your mates by building Hazards on their streets.

I have to say, I’ve seen some interesting things done with Google Maps, but this is one of the most interesting. I’ve always been a fan of Monopoly, but to create a massive online game of it, using the actual world (as seen by  Google Maps) is just brilliant.

What I have not seen yet is a rulebook for the game. How does the game translate to such a large-scale project? How do you roll the dice and take turns? Is there a "Go to Jail…Do not pass go, do not collect $200" card? Are there even Community Chests?

There are a lot of questions, but they should be answered tomorrow. Daily Mail does have a few details. Players will start with $3 million. Pennsylvania Avenue (home of the White House) costs $2 million, and rent is automatically paid each day from $50,000 for a house to $100 million for a skyscraper.

Scrabulous has more than half a million players on Facebook while Hasbro licensee Electronic Arts launched its version of Scrabble on the social network this month has just over 8,000 players.

Hasbro has also sent a DMCA take down notice to Facebook, requesting that the social networking site remove the Scrabulous application from the site.

"Hasbro has an obligation to act appropriately against infringement of our intellectual properties," said Barry Nagler, Hasbro’s general counsel, in a statement. "We view the Scrabulous application as clear and blatant infringement of our Scrabble intellectual property, and we are pursuing this legal action in accordance with the interests of our shareholders, and the integrity of the Scrabble brand."

Hasbro has taken previous legal action against Scrabulous. Mattel owns the Scrabble brand outside of North America and has sent letters to Facebook asking the site to remove the Scrabulous application.

The suit was filed in the Southern District of New York today and names Scrabulous creators, Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwall, along with their company RJ Softwares as the defendants.

Hasbro says it plans to launch more of its games on social networking sites later this year.

"Hasbro and EA have worked diligently to provide a great game play experience on Facebook, and we are confident that fans of the game will welcome a genuine experience highlighted by top of the line graphics, strong technical support, and of course, classic Scrabble game play," said Mark Blecher, General Manager, Hasbro Digital Media and Gaming.

Scrabble and Target Go Goofus

Scrabble finds out it has a huge following on Facebook through an application that “pays homage” to Scrabble. Tapping into this fan base would be a double-word score for the game’s owners Mattel and Hasbro. Hint: Send them all a coupon for the handheld game?! Instead, they’re calling in legal to piss off thousands of potential customers.

Target has tapped into the power of Facebook.This makes their recent blogger relations move all the more puzzling.

PRNewser tells us “a Target PR rep sent the following message to a blogger questioning a recent ad campaign:”

Thank you for contacting Target; unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with non-traditional media outlets. This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest. Once again thank you for your interest, and have a nice day.

Target deals with non-traditional media outlets. They just don’t deal with the Z-Lister that reached out to them.

JCPenney Thinks Link, M&Ms Goes Green

JCPenney created what Ad Age calls “organic search equity” by aggregating blog content into a branded Fall Shopping Guide. As bloggers connected their readers to the content and people Stumble(d)Upon it, the Google Juice started flowing.

Now the site “shows up as No. 5 of 13 million results for the search term ‘fall shopping’ and second out of more than 4 million results for ‘fall shopping guide.’"

M&Ms cashed in on the urban myth equity around its green candy to stand out amongst a sea of red and pink packaging. The end result? Buzz.

Comments

And they want it taken down.

Of course, Facebookers are plenty upset about that, and are rallying behind the game.

The app, according to BBC, pulls in 500,000 daily users, and has spawned Scrabulous cheat websites so players can consult an automatic word-generator.

Classic Scrabble players join me in saying that’s just wrong. If you don’t know any words, you lose. That’s how it goes. And that’s what dictionaries and challenges are for. They’re probably in there looking for how to spell "woot" which is suddenly legal, thanks to Webster.

(By the way, it’s not always good to follow Noah Webster’s and his successors’ lead, you know. Back in the day, after he removed the Us from words like colour and behaviour, he proposed the spelling of women be changed to "wimmin" like it sounds. Thankfully, he was overruled. Unfortunately, nobody stood up to "woot." But I will make a stand.)

It’s unusual that two different companies would cry copyright infringement over the same product, but in this case, Hasbro has US and Canada rights, and Mattel has the rights everywhere else. Obviously somebody leveraged a legal loophole at some point, but that won’t matter as hypocrisy has no place in legal proceedings.

Facebookers, as has often happened, are incensed and misguided as to why, and are scrambling to keep their beloved online past time just because they love it so much, whatever the legal rights of the copyright owners.

Nevertheless, Hasbro and Mattel are pretty set on squashing the game, which was developed by Calcutta-based Indian brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, who apparently have never heard of intellectual property. Otherwise, they may have worked a bit harder to name the game something other than an obvious derivative of the original.

Then again, it may not have spread like it did. Critics have suggested that the two toy companies buy or license the game outright, or hire the brothers rather than go the heavy-handed legal route. However, it really is a golden opportunity to smack an infringer and take his idea and rebrand it properly. Think of how much they’ll save in research in development – thanks Rajat and Jayant!