Last week, we wrote about the legal status of a spate of shameless Wordle clones that briefly clogged the iOS App Store with attempts to cash in on the trend. Today, we get to focus on a story that’s almost the complete opposite of that—the developer behind a pre-existing app named Wordle! is donating the proceeds from an unexpected windfall driven by the unrelated viral hit.
Developer Steven Cravotta writes about how he created a game called Wordle! five years ago, at the age of 18, “mostly for fun, to sharpen my coding skillz, and maybe make a quick buck.” That game—which asks players to build as many words as they can from a set of letters in a strict time limit—drew about 100,000 free downloads in a matter of months before Cravotta “stopped updating and promoting the app,” he writes on Twitter.
Imagine Cravotta’s surprise when the usual pace of one or two legacy downloads a day suddenly increased to a reported 200,000 downloads a week. That popularity spike was, of course, the result of the viral popularity of the other Wordle, a daily in-browser word-guessing game created by Josh Wardle that happens to share the same name (and no other relationship).
Cravotta chalks the sudden increase up to “major publications” failing to specify “that this was an ‘internet browser’ only game, so naturally people went to the App Store to search Wordle.” Even without that, though, the sudden spate of hard-to-parse, link-free tweets promoting the browser game probably got plenty of people assuming it was a reference to a mobile app.
Cravotta isn’t simple reveling in his good luck and going on a shopping spree or something, though. Cravotta and Wardle have both confirmed that any proceeds from in-app purchases on the pre-existing iOS game will be going to Boost Oakland, a youth mentoring and tutoring partnership. Cravotta told The Verge that this charity windfall amounts to $2,000 so far, a number that could easily increasing by the time of the planned donation at the end of the month.
Here’s how a mobile game I built 5 years ago suddenly got blown up by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Jimmy Fallon.
— Steven (@StevenCravotta) January 12, 2022
Wordle! is one of a handful of unrelated iOS word games with similar names remaining on the iOS App Store, all of which predate the newer viral game by years. While Apple purged a handful of apps that aped Wordle‘s basic gameplay and design last week, new clones have popped up in the days since. These can be troublingly easy to find in an App Store search thanks in part to reviews that refer to a “great version of Wordle,” or “it’s not the real Wordle,” to cite just a few examples.
Listing image by Steven Cravotta
