Portuguese 5-letter game already has more than 500,000 players and attracts proposals

When the clock strikes midnight, thousands of people have repeated the same routine: picking up their cell phone and, with their eyes fixed on the screen, trying to discover the new word of the day. The game is simple. A five-letter term that needs to be discovered in six tries. The fame of the letter puzzle began in English, and the same story is repeated in Portuguese. The “Term” started almost as a joke a few weeks ago and, in less than two months, it already attracts more than half a million people a day and even received people interested in buying the game.

São Paulo engineer Fernando Serboncini lives in Montreal, Canada, and works for Google. He is a software engineer and studies games as a hobby. In December 2021, he noticed that more and more people were talking about “Wordle”, the first five-letter game in English. On social media, players proudly displayed the results and some did not hide their anxiety for the word of the next day. Serboncini was curious. So, he took advantage of the cold days of the Canadian winter, spent hours in front of the computer and, on January 5, the Portuguese-speaking version of the game, “Termo” was born. The first word in the game, by the way, was “party”.

“Daily visits have already passed half a million a day. It is between 510 thousand and 530 thousand”, says the engineer from São Paulo. Of the players, about 85% are Brazilian, 7.5% are in Portugal and the rest in other countries.

The mechanics of “Term” are identical to the English version. With each attempt, the game tells you if you are close – or far – from solving the challenge: green letter indicates that it is in the right place, yellow indicates that it is in the word, but in the wrong position and, if it is off, that letter does not work. part of the answer.

Fernando Serboncini tells the CNN Brasil Business which has already received many ad proposals for the game. “Termo” —and other Portuguese versions, such as “Letreco”—have no ads. But, faced with the fever, it is not difficult to imagine that brands are interested in being the answer to the daily challenge. For that, however, they would need to be lucky enough to have five-letter names. The game’s creator, however, said no to those interested. “I’m not interested at the moment.”

The success of the original version, “Wordle”, has already generated at least one million dollars in the United States. Created in October 2021, the game was purchased weeks later, in January of this year, by the most important newspaper in the US, The New York Times. In the same spirit as the letters, the NYT preferred words over numbers to talk about the amount paid: “a low seven-digit number”. That is, he paid a figure of at least one million dollars.

The newspaper says it won’t end the free version, and the gaming world is betting that the NYT will create themed versions, challenges with more or less letters and even allow subscribers to do as many challenges as they want – without the limit of one word per day. .

Back to the game in the language of Machado de Assis, Serboncini says that he has already received inquiries from people interested in buying the game. “Some people got in touch, both from Brazil and Portugal, but I didn’t talk to anyone seriously about a proposal”. “I have no plans for the term to become my source of income. Regarding the purchase, I’m not against it, but I’m not looking for it”.

With the success and more than half a million players every day looking forward to the new challenge, it is not difficult to imagine that, if he wants, the engineer from São Paulo will discover that the result of the “Term”, in fact, can have two words: “a lot of money ”.