Major Mobile Tech Firm Buys Wordle! (techcrunch.com) 14
Wordle!, an old mobile game with the same name as the viral online game Wordle, has been bought by mobile marketing firm and game maker AppLovin in an undisclosed deal. TechCrunch reports: While you may have now heard of the popular online game Wordle, later bought by The NYT, you may have missed the story earlier this year about how a mobile game of the same name was blowing up on the App Store. [Developer Steven Cravotta] said he had been surprised to find a game he created as a teenager five years ago suddenly being downloaded 40,000 times per day, up from just 10 downloads per day the month before, The WSJ had reported at the time. As it turned out, iPhone users had gone to the App Store in search of the Wordle game everyone was talking about and had been downloading Cravotta's game by mistake.
Cravotta's Wordle! game was similar to the online version that everyone was playing. He said he had created it as a teen because he wanted to make something that would challenge people's minds and be a great game for kids. But the app never took off. Cravotta promoted it for around half a year, he says, before deciding to move on to other things. "It just sat in my developer account for the longest time getting maybe one to two downloads a day for six years ... until all this craziness happened," Cravotta tells TechCrunch.
The mobile game monetized through paid advertisements and in-app purchases. While Cravotta could have tweaked the game to make even more money to capitalize on the surge of users, he left it untouched. "I just kind of let it run and do its thing," he says. According to data from Sensor Tower, the mobile game was downloaded approximately 18.9 million times. The vast majority of the installs (more than 99.6%) arrived after the web game went viral -- with downloads spiking on Jan. 12, 2022. From Feb. 12, 2022 onward, the game has seen 13.7 million downloads -- or about 72% of its lifetime installs since its April 2016 launch, the firm said. Today, the iOS game is still the No. 19 mobile game in the U.S. by average monthly active users as of the first quarter, right behind bigger titles like Among Us and just ahead of notable games like Minecraft and PUBG Mobile.
Cravotta's Wordle! game was similar to the online version that everyone was playing. He said he had created it as a teen because he wanted to make something that would challenge people's minds and be a great game for kids. But the app never took off. Cravotta promoted it for around half a year, he says, before deciding to move on to other things. "It just sat in my developer account for the longest time getting maybe one to two downloads a day for six years ... until all this craziness happened," Cravotta tells TechCrunch.
The mobile game monetized through paid advertisements and in-app purchases. While Cravotta could have tweaked the game to make even more money to capitalize on the surge of users, he left it untouched. "I just kind of let it run and do its thing," he says. According to data from Sensor Tower, the mobile game was downloaded approximately 18.9 million times. The vast majority of the installs (more than 99.6%) arrived after the web game went viral -- with downloads spiking on Jan. 12, 2022. From Feb. 12, 2022 onward, the game has seen 13.7 million downloads -- or about 72% of its lifetime installs since its April 2016 launch, the firm said. Today, the iOS game is still the No. 19 mobile game in the U.S. by average monthly active users as of the first quarter, right behind bigger titles like Among Us and just ahead of notable games like Minecraft and PUBG Mobile.
Who owns Wordle? (Score:2)
Seems like the original idea for this game dates back to the game show "Lingo" which has been around since the mid-80s. There's been many international versions of this show, including a successful GSN run in the 2000s. That show offered 5 chances with the first letter being provided, and a penalty for nonsense words or delay of the game creating a bonus letter for the opponents.
A GSN sponsored "Lingo Plus" video game version taught players the 5-letter words list completely because it was infinitely playab
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Word squares and most famously the Sator Square [wikipedia.org] is at least 2000 years old. Although maybe Word Square is not quite a game, it does follow some structure and rules in order to create a new one. For a proper word game, I believe Lewis Carol / Charles Dodgson's Doublets [wikipedia.org] starts to approach the sort puzzle nature that Wordle and the like possess.
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The NYT bought Wordle, the game made by Wardle.
Wordle! is an older app that's been on the App Store for around 5 years. It has no relation to the web game.
In fact, it was made famous because people looking for Wordle mistakenly though the Wordle! app was the official app and bought it. So much so the author of Wordle ended up giving the proceeds of those sales to Wardle. (The sold maybe a handful of copies per month, he then started getting thousands of purchases when Wordle got popular).
Kind of a Dick Move (Score:2)
That explains the ads (Score:2)
It's started showing up in ads in another game I play very recently. I'm betting this is the reason why.
Funny to note - it only shows the one game in the ads - the one that's the same as the NYT ones. Wouldn't want someone to realize it's not the NYT one I guess.
Passing fad (Score:2)
They are buying this at the tail end of a fast fad. Fast to rise real high, fast to crash into people forgetting all about it surprisingly fast.
Maybe they will engage in a bit of shark jumping (Wordle NFT?!) and this would signal the official end of the craze.
Not something I would consider a sound investment.
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Wordle NFT
Maybe, even better, a new kind of blockchain? So like, every minted word would be automatically and forever linked to all the previous words that were minted by the players? And the mint would only work if the consecutive words were somehow semantically related to each other, forming something that the elderly used to know as a "sentence"? And we could call this whole wordchain, maybe, a "book"?
Now that's innovative :-)
Re: Passing fad (Score:2)
Can't be any worse than "Bored Apes Yacht Club"
NYT version is the copy cat? (Score:1)
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It sounds like the app version of the game came first if it came out in 2016. Which means Mr. Wardle's version is the rip-off.
2016? It's Word Mastermind - which was a thing in the 1970s:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boar... [boardgamegeek.com]
...except slightly easier since it actually tells you which letters are right/right-in-wrong-place.
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