'Wordle' Creator Says Unauthorized Clones Drove Him to Selling His Game

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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