Written by Pop, an active Wordscapes player and the editor of Solving Wordscapes. Report, published October 2026, sources checked October 20, 2026. Company figures come from the press and from PeopleFun’s own help pages, all linked. Game data figures come from my own studies.
Millions of people open Wordscapes every morning. Very few of them could tell you who makes it.
The answer is a small studio in Richardson, Texas, started by two of the men behind Age of Empires. Their word game became the top earner of its category, changed owners twice in seven years, and by its publisher’s own count has been played by more than 230 million people.
This page puts the whole story in one place: who built the game, how much it makes, who owns it today, and how its 18,000 boards and its daily calendar are actually built. Every company figure links to where it was published. When a number comes from my own analysis of the game’s level data, I say so.
The short answer
- Who makes Wordscapes? PeopleFun, a mobile games studio based in Richardson, Texas, founded in 2011.
- Who owns Wordscapes? Tripledot Studios, a UK mobile games company. It bought PeopleFun from AppLovin in a deal that closed on June 30, 2025.
- When did it come out? June 2017, on iOS and Android.
- How many people play it? More than 230 million players to date as of 2022, according to PeopleFun.
- How much does it make? About $5 million a month, and $216 million in total by mid 2022, according to estimates from the games research firm Naavik.
On this page
- Who makes Wordscapes: the Age of Empires connection
- June 2017: a crossword you play by swiping
- 2018 to 2025: the AppLovin years
- How much money Wordscapes makes
- Who owns Wordscapes today: the Tripledot deal
- How the game works
- The Daily Puzzle and its fixed calendar
- Events, Wildlife, teams and tournaments
- Inside the 18,000 boards
- What reviewers said
- The community around the game
- Timeline
- FAQ
Who makes Wordscapes: the Age of Empires connection
Tony Goodman and John Boog-Scott met at Lake Highlands Junior High School in Dallas and have worked together ever since, according to The Dallas Morning News. In 1995 they co-founded Ensemble Studios, the developer of Age of Empires, a strategy series that sold more than 25 million copies. Microsoft bought Ensemble in 2001 and shut it down in 2009.
In 2011 the pair started PeopleFun with their longtime colleague Angelo Laudon. It was the third games company they had launched together. The reason was personal. Between careers and families, they no longer had hours to spend on console or PC games, and mobile games fit into a few minutes here and there. Goodman told D CEO in 2020 that they had changed as players and decided to make the kind of games they now wanted to play.
The studio released its first game, Word Chums, in September 2012 and stayed under ten people for several years, according to an analysis by the games research firm Naavik. Word games became its specialty, and by 2021 PeopleFun had 84 employees. The audience changed with it. Back in the Age of Empires days, people told Goodman their son would love to meet him. Now, he told The Dallas Morning News, when he says he makes Wordscapes, the answer is: “Oh, my dad would love to meet you!”
June 2017: a crossword you play by swiping
Wordscapes arrived in June 2017, and Naavik describes it as the game that finally let the studio grow. The idea fits in one sentence: a wheel of letters at the bottom of the screen, an empty crossword above it, and you swipe across the letters to fill the grid. PeopleFun’s help center describes it as a blend of crossword and word search. Android Authority called it a mix of Boggle and a crossword.
It took off fast. In February 2019, Newsweek noted that the game had held a top 10 spot on Apple’s App Store for more than a year after its release. PeopleFun followed it with Word Stacks in October 2018. Naavik counts Word Stacks as the studio’s second biggest hit, yet it never grossed more than a quarter of what Wordscapes made in any single month.
The game’s birthday still shows up in the game itself. In June 2024, PeopleFun ran a special week of dailies with BIRTHDAY on June 14. That week now lives permanently on June 19 to 24, as I documented in my Daily Puzzle calendar study.
2018 to 2025: the AppLovin years
In 2018, PeopleFun was acquired by AppLovin, the Palo Alto ad tech company. D CEO reported in late 2020 that since joining AppLovin, PeopleFun’s revenue had grown nearly sevenfold and its staff had gone from 16 to more than 60 people. The same article credits AppLovin with helping Wordscapes become the number one grossing game in the word category.
By July 2021, PeopleFun told The Dallas Morning News that Wordscapes had passed 120 million downloads, with 4.5 million daily and 14.8 million monthly active players. Across all its games, the studio counted 29 million monthly users in almost 240 countries.
In April 2022, Carol Miu replaced Goodman as chief executive. She had joined in 2018 as the first member of PeopleFun’s product team. The announcement put Wordscapes at more than 230 million players to date and said the company’s annual revenue had tripled, from $100 million in 2018 to more than $300 million in 2021.
How much money Wordscapes makes
PeopleFun does not publish revenue for Wordscapes alone. The best public estimate is Naavik’s June 2022 deep dive.
| Metric | Naavik estimate, mid 2022 |
|---|---|
| Monthly revenue | About $5 million, steady since late 2018 |
| Lifetime revenue | $216 million |
| Share from the United States | 88% |
| United Kingdom, Canada, Australia | 5%, 4%, 3% |
| Downloads | About 1 million a month |
Naavik rated Wordscapes the most effective word game at making money from its players. Its closest rival, Words with Friends 2, only started earning more than half of Wordscapes’ monthly revenue in October 2020. Words of Wonders, which uses exactly the same swipe and fill mechanic, earned about ten times less.
Naavik’s explanation is the events. The core game is a long run of free levels, and on top of it sit time limited collections that keep daily players coming back. One example is the monthly butterfly room, filled through the Daily Puzzle or with cocoons that pop up in regular levels.
Those figures are estimates, and they are four years old. What they show is the shape of the business: a game that makes most of its money from American players who come back every day.
Who owns Wordscapes today: the Tripledot deal
On May 7, 2025, Tripledot Studios, the London company behind Woodoku, announced it was buying AppLovin’s entire games business for about $800 million. That meant ten studios, PeopleFun among them. The press release listed PeopleFun as the maker of Wordscapes, Wordscapes Solitaire and Bricks n Balls.
The deal closed on June 30, 2025: $400 million in cash, plus roughly 20% of Tripledot’s equity for AppLovin. Mobilegamer.biz reported that AppLovin gets no board seat and no say in Tripledot’s strategy. With the new studios, Tripledot says it runs 12 studios with more than 2,500 people in 23 cities, serves over 25 million daily active users and brings in close to $2 billion in annual gross revenue.
So the ownership chain today is simple. Wordscapes is made by PeopleFun, and PeopleFun belongs to Tripledot.
The newest business change players have seen is the Freecash rewards button that appeared in early September 2026 with version 3.13.40. PeopleFun’s Freecash FAQ confirms it is an official partner run by Almedia, that linking is optional, that linking pays a one time in-game reward, and that the feature is rolling out gradually in supported countries only. I cover the details in my Freecash player guide and the partnership report.
How the game works
Each level gives you a wheel of letters and an empty grid. Every correct word you swipe drops into the grid, and the level ends when the grid is full. Real words that are not in the grid count as bonus words and pay one coin each, but only the first time you play the level, according to PeopleFun. Proper nouns never count.
PeopleFun also says that not every real word is accepted, and that finding out which ones count is part of the game. I measured how far that goes. Across the 6,000 regular levels, the letters allow 15,612 valid English words. The game accepts 10,959 of them and refuses 4,653, including YAY on level 415, a board that hands you two Ys. The full numbers are in my study of the words Wordscapes refuses.
When you are stuck, you can shuffle the wheel or spend coins on hints. The four hints are the lightbulb (one random letter), the rocket (several random letters), the bullseye (a letter in the square you choose) and the bees (letters and coins dropped on the board).
The main game has 6,000 regular levels, followed by endless Master Levels. You can find the answers for every regular level and every Master pack on this site. Every word you find earns Brilliance, a score that grows with the number and length of your words and can never be spent. Brilliance drives the leaderboards, which reset every month; you can follow them live on my Wordscapes rankings page. The game is available in English, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese.
The Daily Puzzle and its fixed calendar
The Daily Puzzle is a separate board every 24 hours that you will not find among the regular levels. Some squares carry butterflies, and every butterfly you catch releases another one. Butterflies fill a bar that unlocks four pictures per month. The challenge resets on the 1st, and pictures from the previous month are lost, per PeopleFun’s FAQ.
What PeopleFun does not say is how the boards are chosen. I mapped all of them. The Daily runs on a fixed calendar of 366 puzzles, one per date with February 29 included, and no year attached. The same date brings back the same puzzle every year, for every player.
A few dates break the rules on purpose. April 1 is a prank board with every word stored backwards. The birthday week of June 19 to 24 uses wheels of eight and nine letters, even though PeopleFun’s help page says the largest puzzles have seven. In late 2024, holiday events even served nine letter wheels like CELEBRATE and CHAMPAGNE. Those events were archived at the time by r/wordscapes moderator OCCobblepot, and only the birthday week and MENORAH on December 26 survived into today’s calendar. The whole story is in my Daily Puzzle study, and today’s board is always on the Daily Puzzle answers page.
Events, Wildlife, teams and tournaments
Wordscapes unlocks its features step by step. Here is when each one opens and when it runs, from PeopleFun’s help pages.
| Feature | Unlocks at | When it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Daily Goals | Level 22 | Every day, refreshed at midnight UTC |
| Wildlife | Level 36 | Always on, needs an internet connection |
| Mt. Fortune | Level 62 | One free climb a day |
| Tournaments | Level 65 | Weekday: Tuesday 10 AM to Thursday 4 PM CT. Weekend solo and team: Friday 5 PM to Sunday 10 PM CT |
| Butterfly Events | Tuesdays | |
| Portrait Events | Wednesdays and Thursdays |
Daily Goals are short challenges that pay small rewards and prize keys, which unlock bigger prizes on month long seasonal Quests.
Wildlife lets you hatch eggs into animals. Each animal runs timed activities, which you can finish at once with coins, and pays heart gems plus a bonus such as binoculars, stars, cocoons, Brilliance or bees. My Wordscapes animal spreadsheet lists the stats of every animal, and the egg rotation page tells you which egg comes next.
Mt. Fortune is a daily climb where you open gift boxes on each step. One box per step hides stones that send you back down empty handed, unless you pay coins to keep going. Extra climbs cost coins or an ad. My Mt. Fortune climb advisor shows what each step is worth.
Teams and tournaments. Teams can request hints from each other and compete together on weekends. A team needs at least ten members to enter the team tournament, and team prizes are shared among 50 teammates. In 2020, D CEO noted that weekend tournaments split players into groups of about 100.
Butterfly and Portrait Events place cocoons or binoculars in the regular grid. Ten binoculars earn a random portrait piece, and three pieces complete a portrait for your profile. Cocoons hatch into butterflies for a habitat that changes with the seasons. The full week is on my weekly events calendar.
Inside the 18,000 boards
PeopleFun says the puzzles get larger and harder as you progress. The boards themselves are more precise than that. I went through the difficulty flag stored with every board, 18,000 in total: the 6,000 regular levels plus the two versions in which each of the 6,000 Master Levels exists.
| Difficulty flag | Boards | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | 14,615 | 81.2% |
| Hard | 2,084 | 11.6% |
| Super Hard | 1,301 | 7.2% |
The first hard level is level 14. The first super hard one is level 85, built on SALIVA. The hardest stretch of the game is not the late game but levels 501 to 1,000, where 16.4% of levels are super hard, and the Desert pack (levels 721 to 800) has one super hard level in four. Past level 6,000, the two Master versions disagree: on 749 Master Levels, one player gets a super hard board while the other does not. The details are in my hard levels study.
The word list was clearly built by hand too. The game accepts 94% of the valid seven letter words its wheels allow, but only 60% of five letter words. It also knows 68 recent words missing from the standard ENABLE list, such as APP, BLOG and WIFI. The record for refusals is level 1403, the AMNESIA board, with 53 valid words the game will not take. My conclusion: Wordscapes runs on its own hand curated list of roughly 11,000 words, which I keep on the Wordscapes dictionary page.
What reviewers said
Book Riot put Wordscapes first in its 2018 list of the best word game apps, praising puzzles that start easy and get harder fast, rounds that take only a few minutes and soothing backgrounds. iPhone Life also ranked it first in its 2023 selection of word puzzle games, as its pick for stress relief. Android Authority included it among the best word games on Android but criticized its heavy advertising, which it said makes the game less friendly to players who do not pay.
The community around the game
PeopleFun runs a Wordscapes Ambassador Program made up of volunteer players. Ambassadors pass player feedback to the studio and share official news across the community spaces PeopleFun lists, from its Facebook page and group to its Instagram account and the unofficial r/wordscapes subreddit.
In 2025, PeopleFun held the first WordscapesCon at its headquarters in Dallas. It was open only to ambassadors, who met the development team, gave feedback and playtested upcoming features. The community also keeps its own reference work on the Wordscapes Fandom wiki, which I administer.
Timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1995 | Tony Goodman and John Boog-Scott co-found Ensemble Studios, maker of Age of Empires |
| 2001 | Microsoft buys Ensemble Studios |
| 2011 | Goodman, Boog-Scott and Angelo Laudon found PeopleFun |
| September 2012 | First PeopleFun game, Word Chums |
| June 2017 | Wordscapes launches on iOS and Android |
| 2018 | AppLovin acquires PeopleFun; Carol Miu joins the studio |
| October 2018 | Word Stacks launches |
| 2020 | D CEO reports Wordscapes as the top grossing word game |
| July 2021 | 120 million downloads and 14.8 million monthly active players |
| April 2022 | Carol Miu becomes CEO; Wordscapes passes 230 million players |
| June 2024 | First birthday week of special Daily Puzzles |
| 2025 | First WordscapesCon in Dallas |
| May 7, 2025 | Tripledot announces it is buying AppLovin’s games business |
| June 30, 2025 | The deal closes; PeopleFun becomes part of Tripledot |
| September 2026 | Freecash rewards start rolling out in the game |
FAQ
Who makes Wordscapes?
PeopleFun, a mobile games studio based in Richardson, Texas. It was founded in 2011 by Tony Goodman, John Boog-Scott and Angelo Laudon. Goodman and Boog-Scott had earlier co-founded Ensemble Studios, the maker of Age of Empires.
Who owns Wordscapes now?
Tripledot Studios, a UK mobile games company. It bought PeopleFun, along with nine other AppLovin studios, in a deal that closed on June 30, 2025. AppLovin had owned PeopleFun since 2018.
When did Wordscapes come out?
Wordscapes was released in June 2017 on iOS and Android.
How many people play Wordscapes?
PeopleFun said in 2022 that Wordscapes had more than 230 million players to date. In 2021 it reported 4.5 million daily and 14.8 million monthly active players.
Is Wordscapes the highest earning word game?
It has been reported as the top grossing word game, by D CEO in 2020 and by the games research firm Naavik in 2022, which estimated its lifetime revenue at $216 million at the time.
Key resources
- Wordscapes Help Center (PeopleFun): the official FAQs quoted on this page.
- The Dallas Morning News, July 9, 2021: the founders, the studio and the 2021 player numbers.
- D CEO, December 3, 2020: Tony Goodman interview and the AppLovin years.
- Naavik, June 30, 2022: revenue estimates and the role of events.
- Business Wire, April 27, 2022: Carol Miu becomes CEO.
- Business Wire, May 7, 2025: Tripledot announces the deal.
- Business Wire, July 1, 2025: AppLovin completes the sale.
- Mobilegamer.biz, July 1, 2025: deal terms and Tripledot after the acquisition.
- PeopleFun Freecash FAQ: the official statement on the Freecash partnership.
- My studies: the Daily Puzzle calendar, hard levels and the words Wordscapes refuses.