'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...
"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...
Re:I don't get the argument (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unlike the NYTs, he did not have the resources to sue people who making illegal clones.
Right, but there's no law saying he had to do so. He chose to do so.
He took the money, rather than fight them. A sensible thing to do in my opinion.
I think taking the money is sensible too, but he still didn't have to fight the clones.
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Unlike the NYTs, he did not have the resources to sue people who making illegal clones.
What was illegal about the clones? Were they using the trademarked name or otherwise falsely claiming to be the game that Wardle was making? You don't get copyright protection for the rules to a game (and Wordle is just Mastermind with letters instead of colors).
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If the Wordle Archive takedown [slashdot.org] is any indication, some of the clones were using the same (day, solution) sequence.
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What was illegal about the clones? Were they using the trademarked name or otherwise falsely claiming to be the game that Wardle was making?
They were using his code, which while visible was probably not in the public domain.
In the US, where he lives, I believe the default assumption for code is "all rights reserved" unless a different license is expressed.
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They were using his code, which while visible was probably not in the public domain.
That would do it. I assumed they were clones of the game, not copies of the source code.
In the US, where he lives, I believe the default assumption for code is "all rights reserved" unless a different license is expressed.
Yes, that is correct.
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Also, there was prior art from 1973 that was published in a computer programming book.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Basic... [reddit.com]
So as long as you avoid using the same name, it should be pretty easy to make a clone that doesn't infringe on their IP.
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Prior art applies to patents, so not really relevant.
Re: I don't get the argument (Score:2)
There's a gameshow in the UK called Lingo, which, apart from the one word a day bit, is identical. I've got nothing against the guy or his game, but he has no claim to the idea as I'm sure him and the NYT are well aware
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Hell, it's mastermind with letters instead of colors.
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If he didn't care about money, he didn't have to do anything to stop other people making money.
That's a load of crap. Just because you don't care about money doesn't mean you're happy when someone else profits heavily by copying your work.
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That's a load of crap. Just because you don't care about money doesn't mean you're happy when someone else profits heavily by copying your work.
That's a shit take on what I actually said, which was that he obviously cares. I didn't say he was happy. Also, since his work was an obvious copy of others' work, they weren't really profiting by copying his work so much as copying the name of his work.
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That's a load of crap.
That's a shit take
I just got a brilliant idea for a new game -- Turdle! Thanks guys!
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Also, since his work was an obvious copy of others' work, they weren't really profiting by copying his work ....
They copied his idea and name. What they were profiting off of was social virality - It's the same thing that happens when someone makes a video that goes viral, and then some sleazy folks will start posting it on other websites to try and make money for themselves off
the virality. It is Not necessarily that the original work has any kind of merits that would be profitable other th
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as evidenced by how easily they re-created a very similar game without having a way to copy his code.
Literally anyone could copy the code for the game; it was run entirely client-side via JS. A number of people I know downloaded the site in its entirety to run locally.
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They copied his idea and name.
An idea which he copied wholesale. The name is all that's at issue.
What they were profiting off of was social virality
Sure, that much is clear. I'll even go so far as to say that those which put themselves forward as an official app were being sleazy. But so what? Why shouldn't someone profit from it? The world still runs on capitalism. Everyone needs money if they don't want to die early.
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Capitalism and theft while devoid of ethics
Re: I don't get the argument (Score:2)
People copied his idea not work or code.
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No. People literally copied his code, plugged ads into it and put it on the store.
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No, the idea itself wasn't original. The code listing was even published in a programming book in 1973.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Basic... [reddit.com]
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People copied his idea not work or code.
You're right I fixed it here:
That's a load of crap. Just because you don't care about money doesn't mean you're happy when someone else profits heavily by copying your idea.
Happy? Do you disagree or are you a one trick pony who can only be a pointless pedant?
Oh look, serial abuse of moderation (Score:1)
One troll who's obsessed with me has managed to get modpoints. I wonder if they work for BizX.
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You got modded troll because your ranty diatribe was a bit... Trolly..
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You got modded troll because your ranty diatribe was a bit... Trolly..
Your UID is low enough that you have no excuse for not knowing what trolling is. Yet you still don't. I meant what I said. The definition of troll is not "something I don't agree with". It's "something I cooked up just to piss people off". How do you not know that?
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You got modded troll because your ranty diatribe was a bit... Trolly..
Your UID is low enough that you have no excuse for not knowing what trolling is. Yet you still don't. I meant what I said. The definition of troll is not "something I don't agree with". It's "something I cooked up just to piss people off". How do you not know that?
To misuse Clarke's 3rd Law: "Any sufficiently advanced assholery is indistinguishable from trolling”. :)
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From an IP point of view, he also didn't do anything to help protect the game itself. He didn't file for a design patent pertaining to the look and feel of the game, he didn't file a trademark for the name, etc. If he had filed a patent, he would at least be obligated to litigate to protect it. Instead he simply relied on copyright and the few take downs that were issued were people just trying to rip off his code. If he had wanted to turn the game into a business itself and license it out, then sending out
our brains are cracked (Score:2)
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.
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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?
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A touch of hypocracy. (Score:3)
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.
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But they can't just resell his code - which is what they did - unless he put it under a license that permitted that.
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And Mastermind was just another version of Bulls and Cows, who knows how old that is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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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.
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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
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Search YouTube for old clips of a TV show called "Lingo"
Give me a break (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Copyright in the daily puzzle (Score:2)
In addition to trademark in the name "Wordle", there is also copyright in the choice of solution for each date. From the featured article:
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...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.
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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
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Luck, of course. Just like hampsterdance and a zillion other oddball online fads.
Just a variation of Mastermind (Score:1)
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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
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My wife used to play that. I can see a market for a good clone. The one on the play store isn't that great, apparently.
Unauthorized Clones? (Score:2)
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?
Absurdle (Score:1)
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... and a BASIC game in the 70's. The game in question was just called "Word" and was written by Charles Reid from Lexington High School in Massachusetts. It was printed in the book 101 BASIC Computer Games published by DEC in 1973.
Wordle is just another "unauthorized" clone in this story.
Copies or Reimplementations? (Score:1)
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.
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Which is pretty ridiculous, given how simple the program is. This would be an afternoon project for a beginner. Why take the risk?
Lewdle (Score:2)
Guess the rude word
Knock-off of a knock-off of a....all the way down. (Score:2)
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
Two geography-based games inspired by Wordle, FYI (Score:2)
Worldle: https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ [teuteuf.fr]
Guess the location of a Degree Confluence Point: https://www.confluence.org/gue... [confluence.org]