Modified version originally published in Master the Meta.
Just a few weeks into the year, we already have our first hit game of 2022. As Emily Coleman said, “Wordle is the sourdough starter of Omicron.”
In a world of increasing social disconnection and outside-the-home chaos, Wordle has been a comforting, participate-with-other social gaming phenomenon. The simple word game has gone viral.
It’s taken over your social media feeds. But, unlike the many gaming phenomena since Covid began – from Among Us to Fall guys – Wordle broke through the zeitgeist. Now, everyone wants to be Wordle.
But:
- What is Wordle?
- Who made it
- And, What’s next for the game?
I am very excited this week to present a collaboration with Fawzi Itani, Abhimanyu Kumar, and the team at Naavik. I think their newsletter, Master the Meta, is the best gaming newsletter being published right now. So, it was a dream come true to dive into this gaming sensation with them.
A Brief Game in Brief
Wordle is a daily word guessing game. Players have six tries to guess the five-letter word of the day. Each guess gives you feedback on if the letters you placed are in the word, in the word and in the right position, or not in the word. If it is in the word but in the wrong position, it is colored yellow. If it is in the word and in the right position it is colored green. Letters not in the world are grey.
Several elements of its game mechanics have contributed to its success. Three to focus on are mass-appeal difficulty, limited content, and shareable content.
1. Wordle has tuned the difficulty just right. 5-letter words come in all shapes and sizes. Some, like the word boral are more esoteric. Typically, game designers reserve these for the ‘hard’ or ‘extra hard’ difficulty in their games, for the esoteric bunch of users who like esoteric words.
Wordle foregoes this complexity and chooses words that just about everyone around the world can solve. Recent solutions include solar, panic, tangy, favor, drink, query, and crank. The hardest recent word was rebus, which is a relatively obscure puzzle device. The occasional hard word helps keep players performing at the top end hooked.
The overall tuning serves to hook a mass-market, wide audience. It appears from Google Trends many of those interested in the game are in Spain, Singapore, or elsewhere around the world. The words aren’t too hard for those for whom English is a second language.
2. Another mechanic that is working to Wordle’s success is its limited content. With unlimited time but limited tries, the game has a tight core loop with a clear endpoint. There is only ever one word to solve a day.
As game designers have known for decades, scarcity creates intrigue. In Wordle’s case, the limited content keeps the game mass-market friendly. No one can grind their building technique 12 hours a day, as they can in Fortnite, to outmatch you.
The game is intended to be completed in just 3-5 minutes per day, though some play longer. Those players highly invested will Google lists like 5 letter words with the second letter a. If players really care, they can go more rounds than six. They can play in incognito mode, or on someone else’s device.
This allows users to customize their playtime to their availability and interest. But, they cannot go crazy playing forever. The limited content keeps the game fun, versus a potential addiction.
3. Users share a common enemy: guessing the word of the day. This makes the challenge of taking down that enemy highly shareable.
It is just fun to brag about word games. But unlike most word games – where the difficulty is sorted out via adaptation, settings, or matchmaking – Wordle has a shared difficulty. Most games also draw from a random set of words. Wordle’s single target makes it more of a discussable topic.
As a result, people started sharing Wordle a ton when it came out. One Finnish player started using colored square emojis to depict his progress in the 6 rounds, and it was a hit. So, the game added it.
It is hard to overemphasize how important the format has been critical to the growth of Wordle. It instantly tells a story to players and intrigues non-players. Jim Acosta of CNN with 2.3M Twitter followers even had to join in:
What’s particularly interesting about the format is that it uses emojis cleverly to replicate the entire game meta in one simple sequence. It perfectly adapts to the emoji-zeitgeist of social media today in early 2022.
The format also completely lacks promotions. There is no link to the game. This point is worth double-clicking on. Indeed, perhaps more important than the game mechanics themselves is the game philosophy. As its creator, Josh Wardle – yes Wardle created Wordle – said:
It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun.
In a world where games are hits through social and streaming, Wordle has completely broken the mold on virality and gamified consumer content. Let’s learn more about that story.
The Wordle Backstory
Chapter 1 – Josh Wardle
Josh Wardle began his career after graduating with an MFA in Digital Arts from the University of Oregon at Reddit. He was an Office Artist for three years. Eventually, he made the transfer over to the product management department, where he landed a role on the community engineering team.
There, Josh was responsible for not one, but three socially viral hit projects around Reddit’s April Fool’s Day campaigns from 2015-2017.
The first came in 2015 and was known as the Button. The Washington Post called it, “the Reddit game that ate the internet.” The premise was simple: it would go away if no one clicked the button before time was up. As long as someone, in the case of the pictured images, 716K people, pressed the button, it would continue on.
The game inspired a cult-like fervor amongst Reddit communities. Groups were mobilized to never let the button hit zero. Suddenly, Redditers and writers alike were using it to better understand apocalyptic psychology. Its simplicity allowed users to graft onto it all sorts of their own notions. After two months, the button finally hit zero.
As a PM responsible for engineering smashing experiences, Josh had hit his first home run. The game was a media and user sensation.
This would give the team the space to launch their next social experiment in 2016: Robin. It was a massively multiplayer chat game that had so many simultaneous users Reddit had to shut it down. It would be a great lesson for the team in building for scale.
In 2017, the team hit its third homerun with r/place. Over 72 hours, users were given an empty canvas 1000 by 1000-pixel canvas to color pixels upon. Users were rate-limited in their ability to place pixels. So, alone, they could not make an impact. But, together, groups could get together to create something coordinated.
This resulted in the coordination of over one million users. Their stories number in the thousands and live forever documented in the r/place Atlas. In one example, a group of Redditors formed r/monalisaclan to prove Redditors were cultured and recreate the painting.
In another example, the center, where the US flag ultimately prevailed, was contested territory. Only with the help of r/TheDonald was the flag able to secure America’s place in r/place history.
It was another giant viral hit for Josh and the community engineering team. Another set of learnings for him to file in his bank, too. People liked an open, pure canvas with a limited timeframe. Eventually, Josh switched over to the Software Engineering team at Reddit.
These experiences would set him up for the next chapter. Josh had developed deep history and proven track record in interactive and social game development. In some ways, what happened next was really no surprise, given his expertise.
Chapter 2 – A Love Story
In 2021, Josh and his partner’s obsession with word games reached a crescendo. They had a morning routine to play them.
So, as a love letter to his partner, Josh created Wordle. It would become a part of their morning routine, and they enjoyed it.
This encouraged Josh to share it with family and friends on WhatsApp. Quickly, the game became the subject of the family’s regular group chats. Everyone would thread their replies to the wordle, trying to one-up one another by completing the daily word more elegantly.
Josh realized more people could enjoy the game than just his circle, so he made the game available to the public.
Chapter 3 – Massive Growth
The game was released in November. The first reported player number was 90, a few days later. Immediately, the game had hit product-market fit. Without any paid marketing, Twitter account, or anything at all, it organically grew from there.
A few weeks later, at the turn of the year, we learned that Wordle had reached 300,000 players. It was an impressive number, and the parade of news pieces began. From the New York Times and NPR in the US to the Guardian and the Independent in the UK, as well as everywhere else in the English-speaking world in between, everyone was going mad for Wordle.
As a result, its growth continued. Last week, we learned that Wordle reached 2 million players. With that, Wordle became the first hit game of 2021.
As with all hit games, the next question is: does Wordle tail off from here, or become the next thing in gaming? Valheim was similarly created by a small team, and its numbers have dropped off precipitously. Is that the expected fate for Wordle?
Some argue the lesson from AAA-sized hits from Fortnite to Genshin Impact is that sustained their prominence is quickly staffing up the team and evolving the franchise. Wordle is not doing that.
What’s Next for Wordle?
These days, people are calling into radio programs to share that they are starting the day with Wordle, and then sharing the results in their group chats and Facebook groups. It taps into a different skill than your average crossword or other word game. It involves linguistic, logic, and visual cues. This has made it a great fit for a humblebrag, for instance, if you send a friend the emojis for your extraordinary 2- or 3-try success.
As a result, it has become a shared cultural ritual for a certain type of audience who wasn’t a big gamer. The simple side project has become a social gaming phenomenon upending industry assumptions about sharing, feature design, and growth.
But, there is a growing bear case developing on Wordle, and it is centered around three main risks.
Risk 1: Copycats
Success has brought copycats. Since Wardle has not trademarked Wordle, copycats sprung up as quickly as the game did. The most egregious ones live in the app stores. Wordle doesn’t have an app.
For now, Josh has to rely on Apple and Google taking the games off the App Stores. As of publishing, several games that are not Wordle continue to exist in both App Stores. These are inferior, different games. Any user who doesn’t pursue it further will have been lost.
A larger company might choose to actively help Apple and Google police the app stores. It might have fancy lawyers send cease and desist letters to copycats. Josh has a day job. Although he no longer works at Reddit, he is still a Software Engineer.
Companies like Playco are also clearly watching Wordle’s ascent. They could emulate its strategies for success, more broadly, over time.
Risk 2: Becomes Expensive
Josh has said in interviews that he feels an obligation to the fans. His actions – like updating the game, and maintaining its uptime despite a massive surge in scale – indicate that he is willing to live up to that.
However, running a site for 2 million, or more, players has a cost. It would be in the thousands of dollars a year, at a minimum. And, Wordle has no monetization. There are no plans to change that, either. As Josh told the BBC last week:
There are also no ads and I am not doing anything with your data – and that is also quite deliberate… I don’t have to charge people money for this and ideally would like to keep it that way.
This lack of monetization makes the bear case on Wordle a lot stronger. It is hard to predict a single developer, not being compensated, would be able to maintain a massive user base for much longer than a few months.
It is easy to dream up monetization features like being able to pay to practice prior days, participate in challenge events, or customize the look of your canvas that could drive revenue to fund a larger team.
Risk 3: Single Developer
The final risk driving the bear case for Wordle is that it has a single developer. Wordle has had scarce few updates since launch. A bigger team could easily develop features to improve the funnel at all of the steps of the game.
Starting at the conversation stage of the funnel: if Wordle had an app, it could help capture some of the app traffic going to copycats. In addition, if Wordle had a website like wordle.com, it could capture more of its web traffic. Wordle’s current website does not have Wordle before the dot. The URL is powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle. The game has not optimized this stage of the funnel.
Further down the funnel, features like social leaderboards and special challenges for superfans could help engage and maintain the user base. Without these types of growth features across the stack, Wordle might be destined for the same fate as Trivia HQ: a nice fad that ultimately fades away.
In Conclusion
To see what really happens, we’ll just have to keep our eyes peeled for reported player numbers. Wordle could be in the early part of an exponential curve – Houseparty got over 50M downloads after all. Or, it could have already reached its peak. Time will tell.
