After acquiring Heardle, the musical alternative to Wordle, in July last year, Spotify has killed off the game after less than a year.

After the viral success of Wordle last year, Heardle launched in February as the musical alternative to the word guessing game. Everyday, Heardle serves up a new song intro, first playing just one second. For each skip or incorrect guess, the site plays a little more of the song, up to 16 seconds. Once completed, you can share your score in a similar emoji style to the one that made Wordle so popular on socials.

In July last year, Spotify acquired the game just a few months after launch. Thankfully, Spotify left Heardle mostly untouched, other than a few minor tweaks like switching the URL and including a link to the full-length track on Spotify. They also launched an official playlist of all of the songs featured in the game.

A new pop-up on Heardle announces the death of the game, stating that the last day to access the site and screenshot your statistics to save them, is the 4th May. This is a big shame for those that open up the game every morning to challenge themselves and friends. It’s a strange one too, as I can’t imagine it takes up too much server bandwidth and must draw some users to Spotify. I’m suprised Spotify never integrated the game into the Spotify app.

Spotify gave no reason for killing off the game in the pop-up above, though said the following in a statement to The Verge:

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.