Wordle, a game that has recently appeared on everyone’s radars after its rapid rise to popularity, has now been involved in controversy after some people tried to capitalize on the game’s success – something that its own creator Josh Wardle hasn’t even done himself. The actual game doesn’t have ads or any items that can be purchased with real money. It doesn’t even have any official app on the Play Store or Google Play Store. And so when developers started publishing games that used Wordle’s name and UI, quite a lot of eyebrows were raised, eventually leading to Apple taking action against some of these Wordle clones.
Ripoff titles with in-app purchases, ads were temporarily doing pretty well
Several of these ripoffs were using ads to profit from these games and some like the one created by @zachshakked called “Wordle-The App” even charged players for a premium version. His app got quite popular and he bragged online about how the game got 12,000 downloads, was the #28 Word Game, and also the #4 search result for Wordle in the App Store.
Zach received a lot of hate online and despite his claims of speaking to Wardle, his app was removed from the Play Store along with many others. He later called out Wordle too for apparently copying others.
In a statement to PocketGamer, Apple said “Come up with your own ideas. We know you have them, so make yours come to life. Don’t simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another app’s name or UI and pass it off as your own. In addition to risking an intellectual property infringement claim, it makes the App Store harder to navigate and just isn’t fair to your fellow developers.”.
This is quite surprising as Apple could have made a good profit themselves from these Wordle clones but instead, they’ve chosen to take action. This whole debacle isn’t anything new. It’s just received a lot of attention but this happens with virtually every game that becomes popular and in most cases, the ripoffs don’t get removed.
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