Wordle spawned a swathe of imitators, now the NYT is suing one

War of the Wordles

SUING. That’s the 5-letter headline that sums up the New York Times’ approach to games with similar sounding names to their smash-hit Wordle.

Last week, The Guardian reported that the Gray Lady had filed a lawsuit on behalf of online sensation Wordle — purchased by the Times from namesake inventor Josh Wardle for a splendid seven-figure sum in 2022 — against the geography-guessing quiz Worldle.

Wordle’s success spawned countless projects that hoped to replicate the virality of the word-guessing game. Some, like Quordle, added complexity to the puzzle, while others, like Flaggle, Stockle, and nerdle, borrowed some of the core mechanics and took them into new domains. Indeed, Worldle’s creator is fighting the filing on grounds of there being “a whole industry of [dot]LE games”.

However, none of these, including Worldle’s ~100K monthly players, have matched the original’s millions-strong userbase… which has maintained an impressive amount of momentum, with a similar number of people searching for “wordle” every day for the last 18 months.

Play time

Wordle’s resilience may be explained by its place within the NYT’s thriving games portfolio — which includes Spelling Bee (a Chartr favorite) — a department that’s buoyed the wider newsroom in the midst of a tumultuous media landscape. Axios reported that the NYT Games app was downloaded 10M times in 2023, with company filings showing that revenues from digital subscriptions, into which Games, News, and Cooking are bundled together, rose 12% from the year before, and YipitData reveals that a huge proportion of time spent on the NYT app is now on games.