The New York Times, which owns the rights to the very popular Wordle, has sent takedown requests to developers of variants of the game. Thousands of sites could close.
This is terrible news for addicts of Wordle, the highly addictive game that caused a sensation at the start of 2022. If the original title is not itself in danger, 404Media revealed on March 7 that the New York Times, which publishes Wordle, has called for the closure of hundreds of sites cloning its game.
In its complaint, the newspaper argues that these copies constitute a violation of copyright. The daily “ claims ownership not only of the name Wordle, but also of the general concepts and mechanics of the word game, including its ‘5×6 grid’ and ‘green tiles indicating correct answers’ », Specifies 404Media.
The NYT filed two takedown requests from coders who had developed their own version of the game in January. A final request was made in early March 2024 against the owner of a GitHub repository, which allowed 1,900 different versions of the game to exist. It is all these variations which are today threatened with disappearance.
Wordle, an addictive game that has inspired many variations
The news seems innocuous, but it would be to ignore a game which has quickly become a phenomenon on the internet. The principle is simple and is reminiscent of Motus: players must find a five-letter word in a maximum of six moves. The quicker you guess, the better.
With each attempt, Wordle indicates whether the letters are part of the word or not, and whether they are in the right or wrong place. The result is a game that is very easy to use, and completely irresistible, which prompted the New York Times to buy it for a 7-figure sum from its original creator in 2022.
The site only allows one game per day, thousands of fans of the game make up for their lack by turning to other versions. An entire ecosystem has thus been created around Wordle, with as many absurd as inventive variations.
Numerama offered a selection of variants of Wordle in French, a version with a film extract, with countries, with characters from League of Legendsor a variation where you had to guess the prompt used to create an image with Dall-e — and many others.
If the principle remained the same (guess something in a limited number of moves, with progressive clues), some of Wordle’s variants had completely moved away from the original game. This is particularly the case for certain versions affected by withdrawal requests, which aim “ Wordle clones in dozens of languages, versions for crosswords, versions with emojis and birds, poker and AI », lists 404Media.
For developers affected by these requests, the New York Times’ reaction seems unfair. One of them, questioned by our colleagues, explained that he had not acted “ dishonest “, especially because he knew that the NYT would never create such variants on its own. However, he preferred to withdraw his game, not wishing ” getting into a legal battle with the New York Times. » It is likely that the majority of developers will choose the same option, leading to the disappearance of many of these small games.
The same scenario almost happened in France. Riding on the success of Wordle, a developer has developed a version inspired by the French game Motus, Sutom. It immediately met with enormous success, so much so that France Télévisions, which holds the broadcasting rights to the show, contacted the developer asking him to change the name of the game, for copyright reasons. Faced with the excitement caused among Sutom fans by the news, France Télévisions ended up backing down.
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