I enjoy Wordle specifically because it's zero friction to play (aka there are no ads, no signup, no popups, no nags to subscribe for "$1 a week") - which of course will be the first thing NYTimes adds.
Real bummer, I enjoyed the collective experience of sharing the emoji square badges with friends in group chats. It was a fun daily challenge that anybody could hop in on at any time.
As a bit of a counterpoint to the downsides of NYT's eventual soft-paywall, I think that this fits their arsenal of games rather nicely. I just spent 30 minutes playing around with their catalog of free daily challenges and Wordle fits in very well objectively and aesthetically. I don't think it would have been feasible to expect the dev to pay for server costs of millions of visits per day for what was meant to be a project for his family. While NYT is Bizarro King Midas when it comes to acquistions, this is probably the best case outcome long-term.
The webdesign philosophy of wordle is practically the opposite of NYT's. Wordle is free, accountless, low friction. NYT will turn this into a subscription funnel, and it will lose all of its charm.
I look forward to continue playing until it gets moved to NYT, and then dropping off as soon as they put up a signin gate.
There's a whole bunch of perfect Wordle clones that get ~none of the traffic Wordle gets, and none of the viral word-of-mouth spread. The NYT uses word games as a subscription driver. So that's what they're buying here.
They could implement Wordle themselves, of course, but they wouldn't get the traffic or the interest from players.
Especially considering wordle has no unique gameplay. Its a very, very old game with a million variations. There was even a TV show called lingo or something that did competetive wordle. The only thing NYT owns is a brand since the game is hundreds of years old.
I'm not super happy NYT bought Wordle but I wouldn't go so far as saying that Wordle might "threaten the NYT crossword puzzle", I don't think something like Wordle requires the kind of highly visible editing the NYT crossword does.
I think they just saw a good opportunity to get a bunch of new subscribers. Which is kind of weird because Wordle is super easy to reproduce, evidently.
I did the math on this recently. Supposedly NYT paid $3m for Wordle. The NYT games subscription that includes their crossword and potentially Wordle is $40/year. If they put Wordle behind their games subscription, they would need 75k new users to break even in one year. That seems realistic given how popular Wordle is.
I'll also speak anecdotally. As someone who has done the NYT crossword every day for several years... Wordle + the social sharing has been scratching the same itch and I've actually stopped doing the daily NYT crossword. So buying Wordle could also be protective of their existing revenue.
Agreed. I spend about an extra $5 per month on my NYT subscription for the puzzles. Totally worth it because provides a few hours of entertainment each month. Wordle just keeps my subscription even more sticky.
Wordle would actually fit in perfectly with the NYT crossword app.
The business model is that you get the latest puzzle for free and you can pay a subscription to get access to old ones. Not sure how much money they make, but I've paid more to them than most apps in the store.
NYT have probably the strongest crossword puzzle bases in the world, they probably saw Wordle as either a competitor or a nice addition. They have a side quest basically of owning clever little games like that.
My guess is they've been hearing about it a ton from their crossword userbase and wanted the traffic, users, and IP.
If anything I think Wordle is such a great example of how a simple idea, but executed pretty perfectly, can get traction. Things like:
1. The letter flipping, as another commenter mentioned.
2. How the keyboard colors the keys after your guesses.
3. The social sharing, with the simple (text only!) sharing of your scores.
4. The "once-per-day" nature of it.
5. It's all basically in a single static JS file! I don't have to wait for anything to load, don't need to sign up or login, yada yada (of course, I pretty much expect the NYT to fuck that up, but oh well, that always happens over time).
I could basically see a ton of different iterations of this that wouldn't have been any where nearly as successful.
You can’t explain its success by product greatness only.
I mean sure wordle is fine. But the no-ad and once-a-day features are what the new york times has been doing for years (and yes it works really well). There are probably _thousands_ of other mini games that are no-ad and once-a-day.
The sharing part is pretty cool. It does encourage bragging and probably played a big role in its virality. But yet again, there must be plenty of other games that do that well (and we’ll likely see an awful lot more of them).
Again I do think that wordle is pretty good, but its success is more easily explained by lucky timing and reaching some big influencers early rather than amazingly smart design.
The reason I am posting this is that I think people shouldn’t think that if they build something as good they will have the same success. And I find it a bit dishonest to say “oh of course it had some success, it’s so great” after the fact.
I can't prove it, but I am quite sure NYT got a positive ROI on the acquisition of Wordle. They paid in the low single millions of USD, which isn't much for a brand as big as Wordle had become by then (2 million+ daily players) and it's been used to drive new digital subscriptions [1]. It's diminished somewhat since then but it has remarkable staying power. I can tell that from the Google Trends data [2] as well as the anecdata that I and so many of my friends and family still play Wordle every day.
[Edit: And, nearly two years on, they say they get "millions" of players per day, and they've assigned a dedicated Wordle editor and write articles about the game frequently. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/upshot/wordle-bot-year-in...). They're definitely not having buyer's regret.]
IIRC Wordle was mostly JavaScript and available on the site. At least before NYT bought it. For example you could just look at the word list if you wanted to know the answer every day (it’s just, like, cheating at Wordle would be so incredibly lame and pointless).
If you look at these games you can see that Wordle is a perfect fit. There is no other way to put it.
If Wordle were already in that games list it wouldn’t stick out at all. Especially the aspect of having a daily puzzle that’s the same for everyone is a great fit. Even the whole design aesthetic is similar (it’s a pleasantly useable experience all around).
The biggest differences are the ads and the registration requirement. Which are, I guess, in a sense both ways to fuck it up.
It was a cheap game for the NYTimes to purchase (low 7-figures so probably $1-4M), it's something that people love, and it'll attract a lot of new people to the NYTimes Games brand. For now, that's probably enough. They threw a few million at someone that created something that lots of people loved and it gives the game the institutional backing to continue on indefinitely. I'm not saying that the guy wouldn't have continued Wordle, but he was one person who might get hit by a bus.
In the long run, the NYTimes has so many options - and if they decide to do nothing other than continue a game people love, it's not like a couple million is an insane sum for them to "waste" on something that puts their brand in front of so many people every day.
1) It makes people aware that the NYTimes has lots of different word game options. 2) It makes people think of the NYTimes a lot. 3) They could put a link to a single story on the page. 4) They could offer an up-sell to a SuperWordle or something as part of their games package that might offer slightly different puzzles (sure, you can get Wordle clones all over the web, but a lot of people might not care about $3-4/mo for an NYTimes Games subscription). 5) Wordle could become premium in the future - or maybe just the Sunday edition is premium.
There are so many options. Some might be less user-friendly, but there are a lot of user-friendly options. When you buy something for cheap, you don't need to leverage it a lot to justify the purchase.
Real bummer, I enjoyed the collective experience of sharing the emoji square badges with friends in group chats. It was a fun daily challenge that anybody could hop in on at any time.
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