Draw Something TV show in the works

Draw Something will be making the jump from your phone to your TV screen.

Your weekends might now also include watching re-runs of Draw Something.

Yes, Draw Something -- that mobile app you downloaded because all your friends were doing it -- is going to be a game show. CBS won the rights to the show after a supposed bidding war.

The show will feature celebrities and regular users, competing in teams in front of a studio audience. Viewers at home can also play along for a chance to win prizes.

But players and critics are wondering, "Why now?" The game, developed by OMGPOP and recently purchased by Zynga, seems to have peaked a few months ago, and the concept is not entirely new.

Jamil Hasan, a 2011 graduate of George Washington University, says the idea is silly. He says he doesn't see how people will consistently watch the show, given that the popularity of the game itself was short-lived. At its peak, he had about eight games going on with friends and siblings, but he has since stopped playing.

According to Business Insider and The Atlantic Wire, Draw Something was most popular between the end of April and beginning of May with almost 15 million daily users. In May, the number dropped to about 10 million daily users and is still on the decline. In the app's first six weeks, it was downloaded 25 million times and around 3,000 drawings were being produced every second, The Christian Science Monitor reports.

Anjali Narayan-Chen, a rising junior at University of Wisconsin, has also noticed a definite decrease in the game's popularity among her group of friends. She started playing shortly after it was released early February. When the game's popularity skyrocketed, she was playing every few hours with more than 10 friends at a time.

"With casual players, I'd go for 20 rounds before a guessing mistake occurred. But with some of my more hardcore Draw friends, we would race to the hundred-round cap, crushed when a streak was ended by a guess," she wrote in an email.

Now, as many of her friends have put the game on the back burner, she's playing less as well because there are fewer games to respond to.

She says she is excited at the prospect of a game show, hoping to see more fast-paced, exciting and "punchy" elements that would keep viewers interested.

The draw-and-guess game model is not new. For instance, the show Win, Lose or Draw, on which two teams competed to guess their teammates' drawings, aired on NBC in the late 1980s.

Jonathan Polson, a rising sophomore at University of Vermont, says though the Draw Something show is a recycling of old ideas, people will still watch it. He says he thinks it will do well on primetime, but personally he will not watch it.

The app's crossover shows increased fluidity among mass media of entertainment. Television classics The Price Is Right, Family Feud and The Amazing Race can already be downloaded for iPhones and iPads. Maybe Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and Temple Run will be next.

How does Temple Run become a television show?

"People will try anything because they can't think of new ideas," Polson says.

"It's annoying when people try to monetize ... these things," Hasan said, citing examples such as Battleship's move to the big screen and Angry Birds turning up on shirts and into pillows and plush toys. "Why can't they just let something be?"

Meanwhile, Polson will continue to play Draw Something, even if no one else will.

Julie Xie is a Summer 2012 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.Follow her on Twitter at @julieyinxie

This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.