Spotify is shutting down Heardle, the popular Wordle-inspired song guessing game that it acquired less than a year ago. The decision is apparently driven by Spotify’s desire for more users to discover music through the main Spotify apps (and because the company seems to hate fun).
Spotify’s decision to shut down Heardle was first spotted by TechCrunch. Spotify is making the announcement via a pop-up message on the Heardle website. “Thanks for playing Heardle, but unfortunately we have to say goodbye,” the message reads. “From May 5th, Heardle will no longer be available.”
Spotify says Heardle users should head to their dashboard to screenshot and save their statistics. Those stats won’t be accessible after May 4.
TechCrunch says that Spotify’s decision to shut down Heardle comes as the company “wants to devote more of its energy toward music discovery through its recent app changes, not through Wordle-inspired gameplay off-platform.”
“After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to say goodbye to Heardle as we focus our efforts on other features for music discovery,” Spotify spokesperson Grey Munford said in an official statement to The Verge.
Spotify acquired Heardle, which was inspired by the viral word guessing game Wordle (which itself was acquired by the New York Times) less than a year ago. Heardle challenged users to guess the name and artist of a song in six tries, with each subsequent try unlocking a longer version of the song.
The obvious counterpoint to Spotify’s statement is that Spotify could have (and probably should have) integrated Heardle directly into the Spotify app on iPhone and other platforms. This would have deepened the integration with Spotify itself and likely significantly increase the number of people playing the game.
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