Hank Green “accidentally” bought 10% of a mobile game

Hank Green is getting Gubbins.

“A few months ago, I accidentally bought a part of a mobile game,” he says in his latest YouTube video.

That mobile game is Gubbins, a daily digital word puzzle where you “make cool words.” (And the more words you create, the more “deranged postcards” you can make to share with/inflict on the world, the developers say.)

Green says he found out about Gubbins through TikTok, when the game was still in early beta. He fell in love with it and looked up Studio Folly, its Melbourne-based developer, and ended up offering a “not insubstantial amount of money” for 10% ownership of Gubbins.

“I said, what if I buy 10% of your game? You’ll have some extra money to spend on making the game perfect, and then, once the game comes out, you’ll donate 10% of the revenue from the game to the Foundation to Decrease World Suck,” he explains.

Studio Folly agreed, and Green is now a 10% owner, with 10% of revenue going to the nonprofit world suck-decreasing foundation he formed with his brother John Green in 2007. (The Foundation to Decrease World Suck is the parent organization for all their other charitable projects, like the Project for Awesome, and donates to charities including Save the Children and Partners In Health.)

Gubbins launched Nov. 15, and after Green posted about it, it jumped to No. 2 in the App Store’s word game section, beating out the New York Times‘ word games & sudoku app. It’s free to download, but at that level, you can only play once a day. Players can pay to unlock the ability to play multiple rounds a day.

Gubbins is getting some traction on Twitter, too, with people gleefully posting their “deranged” postcards (and Green retweeting them).

Here are some exemplary specimens: