Editor's Note: Wordle, a "public good" anagram game that has recently suddenly caught fire, has adhered to the original state of the web page, no web page, no advertising, and no other profit model. But it has attracted a wave of plagiarists, what kind of game is this Wordle, and how hot is it that can make Apple kill all the plagiarists?
Apple, the world's most valuable tech company, suddenly banned a bunch of apps on its platform — just to protect the interests of someone who had nothing to do with its own company (for now).
I've never heard of such a thing before, right?
Yet that's exactly what Wordle and developer Josh Wardle, who have just recently experienced...
Wordle is a "public welfare" anagram game, recently suddenly out of the circle, attracting a large wave of users around the world, but it still adheres to the original practice, only the web version, no advertising, no registration process, no paid tipping function, in addition to using cookies to save the user's game progress, nor collect any identifiable data.
This will surely attract a whole bunch of Lee ghosts: these "Lee Ghosts" usually use "Wordle" as the game name, title or search keyword, and in terms of game features, the restoration of the genuine game can be said to be "original"...
Screenshot of a wordle plagiarist's game
I thought that such things were too much, but unexpectedly, these Li ghosts aroused public indignation, and even Apple shot: just a few days ago, Apple suddenly banned a large number of plagiarists of this game on the iOS App Store.
This practice is too rare for Apple.
You should know that in the past, if things did not make a big fuss, for the application plagiarism event, the Apple App Store team used to love to ignore it; what's more, Apple would deliberately allow the existence of plagiarists in order to disgust its "favorite" (want to acquire) app developers (such incidents we have also reported before).
What kind of game is this Wordle, and how hot is it that can make Apple unusually take the initiative to kill the "Lee Ghosts"?
Wordle: Millions of players around the world challenge a word puzzle
Speaking of which, 2022 has now passed half a month, if you haven't played it, or even heard of Wordle, then you're really out... Since its launch at the end of last year, Wordle has become a viral "influencer" game during the New Year' period, with 2.7 million players as of this week and still exploding.
Its game content and mechanics couldn't be simpler:
The enigma is a word of 5 letters in length. Your task is to guess the correct answer within six attempts.
The game starts without any hints, but based on the results of each guess you make, the game will give you hints in the form of color blocks to let you know how far you are from the end of the puzzle.
The following figure is an example:
W appears in green, indicating that the letter is in the word and that it is also in the correct position;
I appears in yellow, indicating that the letter is in the word, but it is in the wrong position;
U appears in gray, indicating that there is no such letter in the word.
The rules throughout the game are simple, but there are also several common strategy genres for completing challenges:
- Vowel flow: The first attempt is to directly know what vowel letters are in the puzzle, try to use more vowel words, such as audio, adieu, louie, etc., and then use consonants to try;
- Consonant stream: Contrary to vowel streams, start with words that contain many consonants, such as psych, crypt, snort, etc.;
- Violent flow: After all, the English alphabet is only 26 letters, 5 attempts can be traversed, you can most likely know what letters are in the puzzle...
It can be said that aside from vocabulary, Wordle has no challenges or "gameplay" at all. And, unlike other games that find ways to increase the amount of time users spend online, Wordle has only one word a day, which also means that you can only play it basically once a day.
However, such a very simple game, according to its developer Josh Wardle, the number of players as of this Monday has exceeded 2.7 million, the number of daily visits has also exceeded 2 million, and it is still growing at a high speed...
The secret of Wordle's popularity is actually its social sharing function.
The general game is a "client-side" mechanic, and each player plays something different. And Wordle game, how simple it is: the game has only one puzzle every day, that is, millions of players around the world, and every day they challenge the same problem...
Many games also have sharing features, and for Wordle, sharing has not been easy to do. After all, everyone is guessing the same word, and sharing is not equivalent to leaking the topic.
But last December, one player @irihapeta came up with a brilliant idea that would allow players to share the results of their game without giving aside — and even a little "mysterious" that those who saw the sharing but didn't know the secrets were even more satisfying:
The player's idea of sharing methods, using the same logic as the game's prompt method, the player's process of breaking through the level, with a solid color emoji to replace.
Developer Wardle was so impressed with the idea that he quickly added it to the game. The content shared is probably like this. Wordle 180 means that this is the 180th question (that is, 180 days) since the product was launched, and the next 3/6 is how many steps are used to guess the mystery.
Soon, Wordle's sharing content was seen overnight in every corner of the social network.
The color block style emoji, like a code code, coupled with related topics such as "#每日Wordle俱乐部" and "Midnight Wordle Club", attracted more users who had not played or heard of Wordle before, and also wanted to join this mysterious club:
In a way, Wordle has even spawned its own subculture.
For example, someone sent this strange tweet in the style of color blocks shared by Wordle:
If you don't understand it, please read the article and we will reveal the answer at the end :)
For example, wednesday's mystery is favor — a huge "controversy" directly between the British and American English spellers. Brian Bilston, the king of Twitter oil poetry, is also a Wordle player, and even wrote a poem for this purpose, mercilessly spitting out the stinky habits of Americans who love to write and save letters:
Concerning Today’s Wordle by Brian Bilstoun
(Translator: Du Chen)
Americans,I have news to report.
The Americans forgive me for having something to say
I have done the “math”
And you’re one letter short.
I pinch your fingers and count your spellings as few as a word
That extra letterGives it colour and flavour.
The word multi has both color and flavor
Yours, with candour
An affectionate neighbour.
From your good friends
An Englishman
There is even an "anagram universe" that belongs specifically to Wordle... There are all kinds of games that imitate, pay tribute, and ridicule it:
For example, Sweardle, who specializes in guessing swear words:
Queerdle, the mystery is all LGBTQ class terms:
Letterle, there is only one letter, go guess it...
II. Encircling and Suppressing "Li Ghost" in the Whole Network
Most of the above gadgets are imitation tributes to "spoof no malicious", and basically all of them clearly write on the website that their inspiration source is Wordle.
As a result, there is really another group of unqualified people who have seen Wordle pop on the Internet and want to take this opportunity to make a big profit.
As we mentioned earlier, even if Wordle became popular, its developers still insisted on a variety of complex business operations such as no ads, no registration, no need to pay tips, and so on. What's more, it's a completely web game, and developer Josh Wardle didn't make it into an app at all.
To put it bluntly, developers have no intention of using it to make money.
However, in the past few weeks, there have been a sudden spatulae with Wordle as names or introductory titles on the Apple App Store and Google Play:
One of the most faceless ones should be the "Wordle – The App" one.
Why is it said that it is the least faceless?
Because its developer, Zach Shakked, from:
"Loved Wordle so much that I had to copy one"
↓
"Look at how much money I've made"
"Spray me what skill, there is a kind of you make one yourself"
"Oh how to take it off the shelves, I was actually canceled"
"Just say what I copied, Wordle 80% of its own copy of others"
"Don't scold, don't scold, I'll never do that again"
...... Such a complete mental journey, he has been live broadcast on his Twitter account.
According to Shakked's own words, he saw that wordle was a fire, found that it did not have an app version, so he directly copied an app version at the fastest speed last weekend.
First of all, this imitation version of the application, in the user interface, game functions of the genuine Wordle can be regarded as the original restoration.
And, Shakked has no qualms about using "Wordle" as the app name — even though it doesn't belong to him.
He even added in-app purchases to this plagiarized version - it only takes $30 to upgrade the "Premium Membership", to be able to jump out of the blockade of the original Wordle every day, and to play without restrictions...
The day after its launch, Shakked also boasted on Twitter, and the app received tens of thousands of downloads and nearly a thousand free trial subscriptions on its first day of launch.
He tweeted: "We're going to the fucking moon."
As a result, two days after the good day, Apple suddenly removed a large number of plagiarized Wordle apps, including "Wordle – The App" and so on, on Wednesday.
It is worth noting that these removed apps basically use Wordle in their names; and there are still some products in the App Store's word game category that obviously "homage" Wordle, but they do not use this name.
Shakked modified his Twitter account description: "I was canceled for developing a Wordle clone. ”
In the past few days, Shakked has become almost a popular enemy in the circle of game developers.
He received a lot of hate emails, and people tried to reset the passwords of his various accounts every day in order to get him.
Even well-known developer and Apple critic John Gruber directly called him stupid *...
Shakked put it this way: "In my opinion, Wordle has become a popular enough game type name, like Scrabble, 2048, crossword, sudoku, etc.
John Gruber scolded him: "Can you find a game on the App Store that wasn't developed by Hasbro and dares to be called Scrabble?" You ****. There may be games with similar Scrabble mechanics, and you may find hundreds of them, but none of them are not developed by Hasbro and dare to call themselves Scrabble. ”
Finally, Shakked couldn't resist. He posted a long series of texts on Twitter explaining his mental journey during this time, which probably means:
1) There is no problem in imitating an existing product to develop its own new product, which is recognized by the industry as a mature business model; Wordle itself is probably a plagiarist (its game model borrows from the British ITV TV station's variety show Lingo).
2) There is no problem with setting a $30 subscription fee, there is no pressure on you to pay, do not like not to pay / do not play is not over.
3) For the blatant publication of downloads and paid data on Twitter, I am really not showing, but as a young developer, I am really excited to see such data.
4) I contacted Josh Wardle, the developer of the genuine Wordle, and proposed three options a) paying a $100,000 license fee b) collaborating on the development of the genuine application c) profit sharing - all of which were rejected by Wardle.
5) The previous release is the minimum feasible version, and the development of new interfaces, multiplayer and other follow-up functions is already in progress. But because it was scolded too badly, and the application was taken down, it had to be stopped. The main thing is that this point in time is too embarrassing, if you forgive him for a few more days, let him put on the new feature, change the name of the game, may not be as bad as today's scolding.
"I realized I had crossed the line. I absolutely, absolutely will never do anything that is even a little bit similar to this. I was really wrong. ”
Admittedly, as Shakked put it, wordle is not the first time a similar plagiarism incident has occurred in the mobile game world. Previously, Flappy Bird and Threes had been heavily imitated and copied. People who may have played Plagiarists 2048 are thousands of times the number of people who have played the original Threes...
And while plagiarists across the industry were thinking about how to continue making money with the concept next, Josh Wardle, the developer of the original game, had no time to care about fame and fortune. Wordle was developed from the beginning for his wife and other family and friends who loved anagram games, and he never thought that the game would become popular.
In an interview with the British "Guardian", he said that he was a little uncomfortable with the fame brought by the game's popularity. He even worries that because of the large number of players, the game may impose greater responsibility on himself, so much so that he has to think about what features millions of users around the world want to meet their needs...
"I need to think it through enough. This game isn't my full-time job after all, and I don't want it to be a source of stress and anxiety for me. Even if I had to make any changes to the game, it was done out of need for me and my wife. ”
…
Finally, explain the meaning of the strange tweet that mimics Wordle's sharing copy:
Author: Spectrum, Editor: Vicky Xiao; Public Account: Silicon Star Man
Original link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/CSYBTJvs9-8gCgXgG3gz_Q
This article is published by @Silicon Starman with permission from Everyone is a Product Manager. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.