Daily word game studio Waffle is the latest small dev to find a big audience – Mobilegamer.biz

Even years after that initial Wordle boom, daily word games continue to attract large, loyal daily audiences – and one of them is Waffle, a title made over two weekends by software developer James Robinson as a side project.

As Waffle Studio, Robinson now has a team of around 10 people working on that debut game and a couple of other word puzzlers, OneWordSearch and Stackdown.

Waffle is not the first small daily word game to find a solid, loyal audience. In the past we’ve profiled Funcraft, Studio Folly and Minute Cryptic who have all achieved similar things with small teams and daily play patterns.

Robinson had been working as a software developer across telecoms, CRM and retail when Wordle went nuclear. He created Waffle over two weekends, released it in February 2022 and posted a link to the game on Reddit to promote the game.

“It was very organic,” Robinson tells us. “I posted the game into two channels on Reddit. I may have dropped into various conversations on Twitter to see if that paid off, but there was nothing more than that for a long time.”

As people increasingly sought more Wordle-like puzzles, the press noticed it too, resulting in coverage from PC Gamer, CNET, and Lifehacker. “For every bit of positive PR our DAU jumped to a new level, and stayed there,” says Robinson.

Waffle grew to around 400k DAU very quickly, and has been sitting at around 475k DAU ever since. It is monetised by ads.

“I had avoided ads for quite a while,” Robinson explains. “In the summer of 2022, someone made me an offer to acquire Waffle. I turned them down three times before they gave up, and they advised me to contact their advertising partner. They told me how much I should expect to earn, and I quickly realised that this could become my full time job. It could allow me to turn all of my other ideas into reality.”

Since then, paid attempts to grow its audience haven’t worked as well as those organic discovery methods.

“We have tried a TikTok campaign, we have tried Meta ads, and we have tried Google Ads,” Robinson continues. “None of it compares to those early PR boosts. We have never been able to noticeably increase our DAU through our own efforts. We also never put any effort into our SEO, we quickly found ourselves as the number one Google search result for the word ‘Waffle’ in every country, and we have a high ranking for ‘word game’, ‘daily puzzle’ simply by word of mouth, thousands of organic searches, and the algorithms promoting us as a result.”

Waffle is playable through browsers too, which appears to have helped tilt the algorithms in the studio’s favour. Even Miniclip has taken note: it has had ‘Waffle Word Puzzle’ in soft launch since January 2024. Robinson and team are now working on follow-up OneWordSearch (around 44k players currently), and another title, Stackdown, which is in beta.

Waffle and similar companies like Funcraft, Studio Folly and Minute Cryptic might not be taking on Tencent anytime soon – but they do suggest it’s still perfectly possible to get traction on mobile without enormous UA budgets and giant dev teams.