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Piracy

'Wordle' Creator Says Unauthorized Clones Drove Him to Selling His Game (msn.com) 60

In January the virally-popular game Wordle was sold to the New York Times for between between $1 million (£758,345) and $5 million. Now the Independent reveals why the game's creator took that step.

"Because so many people were cloning it and making money from it without his permission." Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, said in a talk on Thursday that selling to the Times was "a way to walk away" from the pressure he felt to stop his creation being exploited.... The game's success inspired numerous smartphone apps that simply copied Mr Wardle's version while adding ads, in-app-purchases, or subscription fees, many of which were later removed from Apple's app store.

Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr Wardle said: "That isn't money that I would have made, because I said I don't want to make money, but something about that felt really deeply unpleasant for me. And so selling to the New York Times was a way for me to walk away from that. I didn't want to be paying a lawyer to issue cease and desists on the game that I'm not making money from. It felt like it was all going to get really, really complicated in a way that just [made me] pretty stressed out, truthfully."

Answering a question from The Independent after the talk, Mr Wardle added that he felt "an enormous amount of pressure" and a sense of limited time to act because so many people were trying to copy the game.

Besides the outright clones, Wordle has also led to some interesting variations, including Nerdle (which challenges players to guess the digits and symbols in an eight-digit equation).

There's Dordle (which challenges players to guess two words at the same time), as well as a four-word variation called Quordle, and even an eight-word version called Octordle.

In a recent article in Tom's Guide (titled "I don't like Wordle — but I love these alternatives") they also recommended Heardle and Framed. "The former tasks you with guessing a song based on a short audio clip, and the latter asks you to name a movie based on a single frame." (As well as Adverswordle, where you choose the word while an AI tries to guess it.)

And then there's the excruciatingly difficult Semantle...
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'Wordle' Creator Says Unauthorized Clones Drove Him to Selling His Game

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  • There's a free game on the web without ads and works just fine. We (as a species) can't help but look for a paid version of it.

    I guess we need electronic devices to give us dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. Maybe because we're not being chased by saber tooth lions anymore.

    • Actually it's not "we as a species", it's we as a (basically sapient and sentient) species that is forced to live in a world the operating system of which is based, at its core, on the principle of competition for profit. What do you expect?

    • 'Works just fine'... in a way. NYT only lets you play 1 per day. You can't play any past ones. I bet a large majority of people who liked the game went looking for archives of previous words and versions that let you play unlimited random words. I know that's the first thing I did. Fortunately the archive I've been playing through is still up. I'd never pay for it... but people are looking for what should have been basic functionality, the ability to play previous words and a 'practice' mode word where it g
  • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Sunday March 27, 2022 @05:13PM (#62394721)

    Wordle creator upset that people are making clones of his game? But Wordle is really just a slight variation on Mastermind, a game from 1970. If you have a really good idea, people are going to copy it. Sometimes they'll copy it as-is, sometimes they copy it with a new variation to try. That's just how things work.

    • But they can't just resell his code - which is what they did - unless he put it under a license that permitted that.

    • And Mastermind was just another version of Bulls and Cows, who knows how old that is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • by narcc ( 412956 )

        A version of that was printed in VIC 20: 50 Easy-to-Run Computer Games by Edward Burns and published by Sams in 1983. That book claims that the game itself is "very old" but doesn't give any more details.

        The "wordle" variant of that game on computers goes back to at least 1973.

    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      Wordle creator upset that people are making clones of his game? But Wordle is really just a slight variation on Mastermind, a game from 1970. If you have a really good idea, people are going to copy it. Sometimes they'll copy it as-is, sometimes they copy it with a new variation to try. That's just how things work.

      This paper [uni.edu][PDF] by Donald Knuth claims that the "cows and bulls" variant of mastermind became popular on computers after Frank H. King introduced a computer version of the game at Cambridge in 1968.

      Though Wordle is hardly innovative. The word variation, just called 'word', was published by DEC in 1973 in the book 101 Basic Computer Games.

      From what I can tell, Mastermind was stolen from a children's folk game, replacing numbers with colors. It's possible that the word variation even came before the number

    • by hymie! ( 95907 )

      Search YouTube for old clips of a TV show called "Lingo"

  • Give me a break (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Sunday March 27, 2022 @05:17PM (#62394739) Journal

    His "creation" had prior art back into the 80s [thewrap.com], and perhaps earlier in paper form. The TV game show Lingo [wikipedia.org] has the exact same fundamental gameplay mechanics but in a two-player format. The key part is it is a 5 letter word that you have 5 chances to guess, and the game indicates which letters are exactly correct, and which letters are in the word but in the incorrect position. IE exactly what Wordle copied.

    Anyway, besides the name "Wordle" there's nothing else about it that can be "exploited" anyway. You can't copyright gameplay mechanics. Especially not ones you didn't even invent.

    • In addition to trademark in the name "Wordle", there is also copyright in the choice of solution for each date. From the featured article:

      Mr Wardle also revealed some five-letter words that were excluded from the game, including "dawts", "golps", "crusy", "byded", "yorps", "yrneh", and "gawcy".

      All those words, he said, are valid in English dictionaries, but made the game un-fun. Luckily for players, they were eliminated by Mr Wardle's partner in a custom word game that he made for her, where she rated words

      • ...there is also copyright in the choice of solution for each date.

        That would probably be argued at great length in court. How much creative effort is needed to pick an arbitrary 5-letter word? In particular, if he uses a computer to randomly select 5-letter words until he gets one that he doesn't immediately disqualify, there would be even less creative effort than if he thought of a word himself.

        It's not a straightforward question, and I'm not sure which way a judge or jury would decide.

      • I seriously doubt that a word list could be copyrightable. Copyright law protects specific things like "Phonographic records" and "Works of literature" (which includes written instructions, which itself includes computer code). It shouldn't protect a list of words plucked out of a dictionary any more than it protects clothing designs (which it doesn't).

        If the word list was generated by a computer program from an existing dictionary, it definitely would not be protected. (The output of computer programs is n

    • If it was that old and already done, why was his version so successful? I don't play it, but I see at least 10 to 15 scores on my FB feed daily.
      • by narcc ( 412956 )

        Luck, of course. Just like hampsterdance and a zillion other oddball online fads.

  • The origin of Wordle dates back to 1972 with the game Word Mastermind (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5662/word-mastermind) which is a variant of Mastermind. I wonder if he was worried about be sued by them.
    • There would be no case for suing, as you cannot copyright game mechanics or rules themselves in most countries - in that regard, he had nothing to be worried about.

      Now, I can bet he was getting a lot of undue flak from people wanting "Wordle" and instead grabbing something off the app store which promoted itself as "Wordle" in many ways but was infact a third party clone, often with bad experiences, invasive ads, required subscriptions, premium "features" etc and then complaining about it - this is quite co

  • We used to call them genres. I guess we should be happy it took this long for the the game development industry to start down this path. How long until indie devs depend upon Russian hosted servers on the black web to make money selling their games?

  • Don't forget Absurdle [qntm.org], which is an adversarial version. Instead of trying to guess the secret word, after each guess the program gives you the response consistent with the largest number of valid words (and the previous guesses). As a result, you are really trying to reduce the number of possible words until there is only one left. It is a lot simpler to play than it sounds and qtnm provides an excellent explanation [qntm.org]. The program is deterministic, so the same guesses always produce the same game, but her
  • Clean-room alternatives (like Wordii https://frequal.com/wordii/ [frequal.com] ) seem to be "the sincerest form of flattery", as they say.

    What really seems to bother Wardle are people who simply downloaded and repackaged his code to turn a profit. That would be frustrating. Especially since fighting it would take money, which he didn't have since Wordle was free.

    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      Which is pretty ridiculous, given how simple the program is. This would be an afternoon project for a beginner. Why take the risk?

  • Guess the rude word

  • Wordle's core gameplay mechanics are functionally identical to the 1987 game show Lingo [wikipedia.org]. (My spouse loved to play an online flash version of that game and was sad when flash deprecation killed it.)

    Wordle's woes about clones and knock offs ring a bit hollow since it too is a clone of a show that has been running in rerun and new episodes on GSN for the last couple of decades. Just take the money and run, mate.

    Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to work on my word or phrase letter guessing game with a large h

  • Worldle: https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ [teuteuf.fr]

    Guess the location of a Degree Confluence Point: https://www.confluence.org/gue... [confluence.org]

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