It turns out not all Wordle clones are Wordle clones. One that isn’t is doing some good. Now let’s be clear: The ones we heard about last week are a bunch of bad actors. Wordle is a daily, online word game. Games in the App Store with the same name and the same game mechanics are knock-offs. But, as I say, there’s one Wordle in the App Store that should be there and that is doing good.
Ars Technica has been keeping track of Steven Cravotta on Twitter. There, the piece says:
…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.”
The game plays a bit like Upspell, if you know that one. In Cravotta’s game, Ars Technica says players “build as many words as they can from a set of letters in a strict time limit…” After about 100-thousand downloads five-years ago, downloads were trickling for Cravotta’s Wordle - one or two a day, until this month, when they rocketed up to about 200,000 per week.
Blame the other Wordle. Or thank it. Ars says:
Cravotta chalks up the sudden increase to “major publications” failing to specify “that [the Wordle that was sweeping the planet] was an ‘Internet browser’ only game, so naturally people went to the App Store to search Wordle.”
Personally, I think he’s being too hard on the writers versus the readers, but whatever. Carvotta’s game is free to download. I did that. While it says there are in-app purchases available, I have not found them. Someone has, and he is making money. And he’s giving that money away. Cravotta told The Verge that the huge number of downloads has converted to $2,000 at this point, though he’s hoping that number will go higher. Between now and the end of the month, Cravotta says “any proceeds from in-app purchases in the iOS game will be going to Boost Oakland, a youth mentoring and tutoring partnership.”
