The New York Times buys Wordle | Hacker News Reader

The New York Times buys Wordle

nytimes.com

902 pointslucis581 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20220131213921/https://www.nytim...

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1488264128422678535

> for a price "in the low seven figures"

That's a lot cheaper than I expected, considering it has a dedicated daily user base in the millions. ~$1/active user is an absolute steal if you are just talking customer acquisition, let alone the actual asset and brand. NYT essentially just bought the hottest new social network.

On the other end though, a single developer getting paid millions for a few days worth of work certainly doesn't hurt.

> That's a lot cheaper than I expected

Yeah, same here. I would like to compare the most valuable numbers to something like HQ Trivia, which was far more expensive to run (even when they weren't giving away $X00k per day in prize money).

Something very special about it, a few items that jump out at me:

- No permissions nags or signup required

- Massively popular seemingly overnight, despite no multiplayer features

- Sharing your score is both cryptic / interesting to noobs and a big network factor

- The one-puzzle-per-day part seems to put bring everyone together

Spelling Bee already is free and shares many qualities with Wordle: one puzzle per day, simple premise... I wonder if you see them try to add more "sharing" features to it. I see people share redacted screenshots of Spelling Bee every once in a while, but it's more work to do that.

The free version of Spelling Bee is limited: it cuts off once your score reaches "Solid", less than half way to "Genius".

It does? I haven't tried the free version in a long time but now that you say it, that does ring a bell...

Well that certainly doesn't help for virality.

Genius is literally the entire point. Pretty weak free offering.

Agreed, it's a coup for the new york times customer acquisition team.

I expect the factors keeping it from being higher include: the possibility that it's a fad and vanishes as fast as it rose, or the fact that recreating it from scratch is also just a couple days work.

I'm having flashbacks to Zynga buying Draw Something right as it was peaking for 200 million before a total collapse.

That being said, Wordle at a few million for access to that many daily users... Doesn't take a ton of them signing up for NYTimes puzzle accounts to make the math pencil out.

Happy for the creator, avid fan of the game myself. It's the perfect 10 minute break in the middle of the day.

I'm not planning on stopping anytime soon. I'm sure I will eventually but for now it's a fun quick puzzle that I'm not allowed to get sucked into for more than 10 minutes a day.

Seriously trying to internalize some design lessons from it and might pivot a couple puzzle game ideas (that are still pretty early) to incorporate some of the ideas of Wordle. Unforunately those puzzle ideas aren't quite as inherently viral, in that they pretty much just have one solution and not multiple paths to a solution you can show off...but at least the one set challenge per day I can incorporate.

I'm not sure that will last, though. I told myself that, and then I "solved" it. 4 words, with no overlap, covering most of the common letters... it's near impossible to lose. I went through the archive, needed to use the 6th row for just one out of 20 or so puzzles.

Sure, there are more optimal solutions for individual puzzles, but it's no longer much fun - it pretty much reduces to just solving an anagram.

No-one I know plays it simply to win. I like starting with a new word every day just to see where it takes me. It's a meditative ritual. When we actually lose that itself becomes a fun topic to discuss.

Yeah, exactly. I mostly try a different word each day. It is most optimal? Nah, but then I'm basically just turning up the difficulty level a bit.

I've added my own extra rule that I have to retain any existing knowledge from row to row, so green letters have to stay in place, yellow letters have to be included (and moved), and grey letters can't be used again (not that you'd generally want to).

I think that keeps it much more fresh from day to day, although I haven't thought too hard about meta strategies. I always input the same first word but then go from there just using what comes to mind first without violating any of my current "rules".

That's basically what hard mode is in the settings. I don't stick to that strictly so I haven't turned it on, but I do mostly do what you say. Sometimes I'll let a guess not include those letters though, especially if I'm struggling.

TIL Wordle has settings. Interesting, thanks!

Basically just toggles for Hard Mode, Dark Theme, and Color Blind Mode, and links for his email and twitter, but yep, it has them.

You solved easy mode. Now play on hard mode. And force yourself to choose a unique starting word each day. It'll be fun again, and you might get it in less than 5 words.

From what I've read about ML solvers, if you know the solution dictionary (2500ish words) you should be able to never lose, and solve in roughly 3.5 rounds on average. So, from a mechanical perspective you are underperforming the robots.

I am too, and I know it, so I play with the secondary purpose of getting creative with my word choice. Find a starting point, a new combination of words every day. React to the information from your completed rounds. Try out hard mode. etc.

Same.

Draw Something was a frenzy of novelty and delight. It wore out fast. I went from playing a dozen times a day to never opening it again within a month.

Wordle is something I do like clockwork every morning. Along with 4 friends in a group text. Just like a daily crossword puzzle, or a Jumble, or whatever Cracking the Cryptic posts on their Youtube channel.

The only thing that will stop me is if NYT decides to get heavy-handed with it. Ads and subscriptions and other gross bullshit will kill this game fast.

I already found a clone that lets me play historical puzzles in succession. I think the puzzle mechanic is neat, and when I'm in the mood I want to play it for a bunch of rounds until I get tired of it, then put it down for potentially many days. I'm not interested in the daily hook thing—I think it's a scummy pattern (even though I share the admiration of having it free of ads and tracking).

Why do you think it's a scummy pattern?

Because it’s an artificial limitation that only serves to benefit the creator of the game by getting players to come back every day.

> Seriously trying to internalize some design lessons from it

I've thought about this too. Should all games in the future be limited to just one game a day? Lots of puzzles could easily support this, but I'd be worried that it annoyed my users more than it made them happy...

Due to it being so simple to make, there are also tons of clones of the app on the app stores since there isn't actually an official app. I imagine a lot of people are actually playing those clones and not the website.

Are the clones solving the original each day so they can have the same target word?

The answers for each day (past and future) are hard coded in the javascript source and viewable in the client, so they are quite accessible for anyone that's interested

Is the couple days work thing really relevant? You could have a solid Airbnb clone in a couple months (I'd imagine) and it's worth thousands of times Wordle. I think it has to be customer base, IP, and developer team that they're really paying for.

There's not much network effect for wordle. If you make another one tomorrow I can just as easily play it there. To be honest buying his game was as much a courtesy from the times as anything, if they were unscrupulous and didn't fear brand hit, they could simply copy it.

It might be a defensive acquisition. They don't want free word games to be out there. They want a monopoly on word games.

They definitely bought it for the current userbase not the actual content, the NY Times article opens straight into how they are hoping to switch it to a subscription after the "initial" period.

Even if they only convert 2% of current players to 1 years worth of subscription that's 2 million of whatever "low millions" they put into it without having to grow their own userbase from scratch while competing with the original free one everyone is already using today.

> There's not much network effect for wordle.

The game is viral because of the way people share their results on social media. This is a huge network effect.

I don't think so. You could make a Wordle clone with exactly the same ability to share results, and there would be no reason to use the original Wordle over Wordle 2. This is not true of say, Facebook - the fact that all your friends are already on Facebook makes it more valuable than Facebook 2.

It's like a magic trick, you can only do it once, the network effect is cultural.

You could have a better Twitter even faster. So I suspect you're right.

Isn't the dev team one guy? I don't think they are hiring him.

I think it's normal to acquihire for stuff like this. But I'm not confident. Maybe it's just a condition of sale that he spend a week talking to the NYT games team about the design and codebase.

> You could have a solid Airbnb clone in a couple months (I'd imagine)

I've never worked there, but I imagine you are hilariously wrong. You couldn't even make static copies of the website and mobile apps on all platforms in a couple months. That's not even talking about the servers needed to serve a high volume CRUD app with built in messaging platform. There's also the fact that none of it would stay running without the active maintenance by the ops team and developers. Zooming out, the consumer facing stuff we are talking about probably makes up about 10% of their total codebase and the practices around it. Zooming further out, the business would grind to a halt without the operational practices and personnel keeping it running.

You might be able to make a clone of what Airbnb looked like a few months after it started in a few months.

While building all of airbnb is hard, let's look at a clone like outdoorsy, which is airbnb for rv's. It was very functional a year ago, and i doubt if it took a decent team more than a few months. The lore of how to build for scale is now far more widely known, and anyone doing dd on a codebase can figure out if scaling a monolith will require a full scorched earth or whether its has nice modularity allowing it to scale in flight, and/or get to fairly high scale with light application of autoscale shards and now commonplace cloud methodology.

The issue is brand and usability, and wordle has it. The method for social sharing is genius, i think. A great example of privacy by design (sharing is explicit and through an image not a share button going who knows where).

It would take months to make static copies of the website and mobile apps? There are youtube videos where a single guy does it in 40 minutes.

The AWS bill and ops are definitely relevant but didn't seem to be in the spirit of the original point about it taking X days to make. I didn't take "make" to include the effort of staffing up customer service people and whatnot. Maybe I should've but I dont think that's even what the person I responded to meant.

> There are youtube videos where a single guy does it in 40 minutes.

I don't believe this, but I'm happy to be proven wrong!

Web, Android, and iOS? Fully internationalized? Every single screen, including hundreds of variations that only apply to specific weird scenarios that you only see once you're managing hundreds of thousands of stays a day? Special promotions? Screens that only appear in specific markets? All of the little frontend interactions?

I'm guessing you saw a guy bang together one or two simple screens in english and skip a bunch of details

Akshually, you’re just a kill joy who thinks they’re always right all the time. Great job being literally correct but missing the point by a mile.

" That's not even talking about the servers needed to serve a high volume CRUD app with built in messaging platform. "

Nah, people use way too much bloatware in that stuff. OKCupid had a big advantage over its competitors back in the day because they wrote fast code that saved them a ton of bucks on servers. Some of it is FOSS now: see okws.org . These days I'd consider seastar.io as an alternative.

There is no Wordle IP except the name and the color scheme.

Developer time would cost $10K.

Customer base... who like wordle because it's a simple, clean, free, not NYT.

They could work around that last point pretty easily. Add NYT logo top left, add NYT puzzles promo and sub up-sell on the stats page after the daily play. That could be done in a way that wasn't overbearing.

Airbnb is not about the app, it is the database of available rooms with reviews and photos and all the details, also the brand value that generates page views to make those bookings happen.

The app is very very small part of Uber or AirBnb business

Also the possibility that it will lose all its charm now that NYT has to figure out how to make money from it. Part of the fun is that its a goofy little niche project.

NYT does crosswords well. I suspect they'll put wordle on the crossword app and use it to get people to get a crossword subscription.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic but it's such a low amount that maybe NYT doesn't really need to recuperate much. Just attaching their brand to it and posting a message on it every month or two is already worth it for them.

Hell, I wouldn't be _too_ surprised if just having the existing 1m+ Wordle user base visit the NYTimes website most days just to play, and the extra page views and potential other pages users list once they there - might be worth "low seven figures" to them all on it's own. Just redirecting the world site/page to nytimes.com/wordle and wrapping their header/footer/ads around it might well add several million in value to them over a year or two...

(No guarantee that it'll actually last that long with that many users, but it might go the other way too, with NYTimes brand behind it it might double or 10x its DAU as well?)

I think an undervalued bit of value here is that everyone is guessing the same word every day, enabling the social sharing of "wordle plots".

So even if you have a recreation, you need to own the canonical word list to gain the social sharing value that helped it spread.

I hope then that the NYT vetted the word list before buying the app. I can tell you that there is at least one Scrabble-banned word in the answer list.

I am actually surprised how high the price is given this. Hard for me to imagine Wordle is still popular a year from now.NYT must be counting on converting x% of Wordle users into subscribers so the acquisition price is effectively advertising spend.

They'll have to re-work it so much if they put it somewhere else that I expect the integration work would approach the cost of just re-implementing it.

I doubt it. I just downloaded the source and have it running from my local machine. It took me about 3 minutes.

I don't mean re-host, which is obviously trivial for this site, given how it works. I mean integrating with any kind of broader site ecosystem (styling, may need some kind of embedding or nesting, re-sizing to fit with other content, et c.), modifying branding, integration with apps (even "just embed this existing page in a webview" rarely goes as smoothly as one might hope), that kind of thing. If they do anything more than barely touch it at all—that is, if they try to actually use it for much—it's likely to be a decent amount of work.

I figured they were buying the IP more than anything.

Wordle itself is a clone of Lingo, an old TV game show. I’d be surprised if there is any IP. Now there is value to the site, I wonder if there will be lawsuits from the creators/owners of Lingo. Actually I don’t think they were first to create the concept either. Maybe it’s like chess, way too old for anyone to “own”.

While I play wordle, I'm not sure that it will be popular a year from now so I think that's a good price for him.

My circle's all over it now but I'm with you. Doubt it lasts a year among most of us.

Wordle is the sourdough of Omicron.

> Doubt it lasts a year among most of us

Wonder if anyone else plays it anymore.

A lot of people are sharing their grids on Facebook or whatever. That's going to get old fast.

But but but Wordle is one step beyond Towers of Hanoi when it comes to basic programming exercises.

Yep.

Writing code does not make for a finished project.

This guy got the deal because he had the user base. I don't know how much of that was luck, how much was smart iterating over a simple idea until it "clicked" with heaps of people, or how much of it was subtle but powerful viral marketing tactics.

You're right, I suspect 75+% of people here could have a working implementation of this in an afternoon. But none of us did. And none of us have over a million DAU. And none of us closed a deal with NYTimes. Josh did. In 4 months. While holding down a day job. Major respect from me.

The idea and code is about as worthless as the idea of selling identical hamburgers everywhere across the globe. An "easy" idea and plan to have. McDonalds out-executed pretty much everyone there.

No I mean, it's literally a coding exercise ala,

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python-program-for-word-guessi...

I'm not sure where NYT is doing here. It's not like the idea can be patented, and the popularity has not been proven anything other than a Twitter fad. It's the next Sudoku - it's already been cracked to be absolutely brain-dead simple to cheat.

McDonalds is a weird analogy to bring up, as the end product is absolute lowest common denominator trash food.

But yeah - all the best to Mr. Dan - lottery ticket printed out. Users as the product and all that.

> No I mean, it's literally a coding exercise

And literally nobody except Josh has closed a million buck deal for it...

It kinda proves my McDonalds point (however bad an example that might be). Nobody even needed to think up the word game idea. Anybody (at least in this site's demographic) could build it. McDonalds are pretty much the only organisation that've succeeded in opening up burger joints across the globe, even though it's an easy idea and making burgers isn't hard.

> I'm not sure where NYT is doing here

The "wordle" brand alone is easily worth $1m

The creator says here

https://slate.com/culture/2022/01/wordle-game-creator-wardle...

that he built the first prototype in 2013. So it's not exactly an overnight success.

From the same article, he says the two big changes he made were that

1/ the first prototype allowed for continuous play, ie when you got one word right it immediately offered another, instead of having one word per day

2/ the list of possible 5-letter words was reduced to "common" words (you can guess using all existing words, but the words to be discovered are usual ones, not obscure words nobody ever uses).

The second element is a kind of "dumbing down" that broadens the audience, and the first one clearly has a social element to it.

that he built the first prototype in 2013.

But it's essentially Hangman, isn't it? With, actually, a worse user interface.

The coding is easy. Getting the design (one word a day) and sharing right is one of those things that is easy in retrospect.

Didn't an HN user create the ultimate "basic programming exercise" with a bingo card creator? It's never about how simple the implementation is, it's a mix of factors including timing, execution, luck, and finally, implementation.

Considering there is no revenue at all right now, and he’s likely spending thousands on hosting, he was probably dying to offload it. Especially bec there’s 100s of knockoffs now.

I think part of the success of wordle was the network effect of having a single word to share your success or failure with everyone who's playing. For a group of friends you could probably get people to switch but there's still the wider population effect of the shared puzzle each day. That second is much harder for any copycats to replicate.

From what I can tell it's all client side, including all 5 letter words. You could host it pretty cheaply.

Yep, I just downloaded the files and I'm running it locally. It only took a few minutes.

> Considering there is no revenue at all right now, and he’s likely spending thousands on hosting, he was probably dying to offload it.

Thousands?

It's a 60kb Javascript file, seems quite static to all users, and appears to be cached and delivered from CloudFlare. I don't think their free accounts have bandwidth limits, just feature limits, so... it's probably more "pennies" on hosting than "thousands." Given the popularity of it, it's a good bet that it's almost always in the CF cache, so very few requests going through to the origin.

This is more of a "You could host it on a home ISP" type project with how well caching systems handle it. Or toss it in a Google Cloud Storage bucket, which has reduced egress fees to CF and it'll still be constantly cached.

Nothing I see indicates it's the slightest bit expensive to host.

From an interview with the developer:

> put Cloudflare in front of my website; then more recently, we migrated the hosting to Amazon S3, which can scale indefinitely as long as I’m happy to pay for it.

...

> it does cost me a bit to keep the servers up to run Wordle

https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/12/josh-wardle-interview-word...

It shouldn’t… It would be free on github pages, netlify, and others. Cloudflare should make anywhere else effectively free, as well. It’s likely a decision to reuse whatever existing hosting/deploy strategy he uses for the rest of his site or just apathy towards spending however much is being spent.

Cloudflare Pages (their Netlifly / Vercel competitor) offers unlimited free bandwidth. Wonder why he switched to AWS?

To a large degree: https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github...

Indeed, the app is completely client-side with static files, and it seems there is already a fully functional mirror of the current version on IPFS:

https://bafybeic4blel5vf4il73n3nzt6vw7npsov6or3cp3myjms4npii...

Yeah, it should be almost free to host given that it's completely static.

He's probably paying tens of dollars per month if he put Cloudflare in front of it.

Who could have predicted a game with no strings attached would end up selling for so much.

> NYT essentially just bought the hottest new social network.

No one comes to wordle wanting a social network. It's nice because there's no built in social or ad bs and the results can easily be shared anywhere you want if you want.

> there's no built in social or ad bs and the results can easily be shared anywhere you want if you want

Not for much longer. NYT has to recoup that investment somehow.

Call to uninstall the app?

There is no app to uninstall.

Oh there will be, though.

The NYTs existing games are on a website.

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.

They could already have cloned the game—even if the mechanics were novel, which they are not. The thing isn't even at a relevant domain name. I don't see how they bought anything but the name "Wordle" here—and, hell, maybe that alone is worth seven figures. God knows I'd have sold it for that, if it were mine.

Well they might also have bought the trade dress.

I think nyt being the top result when people search "wordle" is probably worth 7 figures.

Sure, I'm not saying it was a dumb move at that price. Depends on how much staying-power the fad has, I guess.

Though when I first tried to find it a couple weeks ago, Wordle was not the top result for "Wordle". Result 3 or 4 IIRC. But I'd expect NYT can fix that.

Just because they could have easily cloned it doesn't mean it's dumb to reward (and be seen rewarding) the creator.

This is better PR than a media goliath ripping off the success of the little guy.

Thez bought a redirrct from the current website to their domain. At some point in time all wordle players will move to nytimes.com/wordle or similar at least once.

I've found[0] https://timewarple.com/ which allows me to play older wordles. It requires you go in order 0 & beyond, button to advance is in the statistics tab after you complete the current round.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wordlegame/comments/rxeg1f/you_can_...

In case anyone interested in a NYT games subscription didn't know this it is half price if you also have a NYT newspaper subscription. If your games subscription is set up to auto-renew it stays at half price even if you no longer have a NYT newspaper subscription when the games subscription renews.

Too bad it'll take months for the savings to offset the time you will invest in canceling the NYT newspaper subscription...

If you pay for a NYT subscription with PayPal, you can cancel payments w/ PayPal. NYT will auto-email you often, but eventually give up.

> The business model is that you get the latest puzzle for free and you can pay a subscription to get access to old ones.

Are you sure? I just tried to see today's crossword from a non-logged-in browser, and it said that I had to be subscribed.

I've only tried it from their app, so maybe it's different. I may also be thinking only of the Mini crosswords.

The Mini is free. The main one seems to be sub/app only. The bee one lets you enter a few words and then throws up a paywall. On iOS, I cannot get the keyboard to appear on Mini as of the last few weeks, so stopped visiting completely.

I am a regular user of the NYT games page. As long as you have adblock enabled its a pretty good experience. For some games they might post a leaderboard and certain games like the crossword require you to have a subscription. But many others are free and have no login requirement such as the Spelling Bee [1].

1. https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee

I ran into this after a few minutes of play.

https://i.imgur.com/b8P2iVM.png

Yes me too, and it confused me. Does that mean I got all the possible words? I got around sixteen IIRC, but feel like there might be more? I don't know, but that screen is a dead end which doesn't either make that clear or let me go back.

And BTW I'm using Chrome with uBlock Origin enabled here.

I've got that screen after a couple of words. It might be point-based because I swear I got it very early after getting an 8-10 letter word. Other times it doesn't show up for 15ish words.

The game is points-based, "genius rank" means something like 80% of the possible points have been found.

https://i.imgur.com/dw244XL.png

You can't actually complete the game without paying. I think it's a pretty dark pattern - get the player invested, then block their progress.

There is one freemium model for Wordle that has seemed obvious to me since the first time I launched it on a laptop after playing the first few on mobile: sync. The emphasis on historical play data and streaks make portable continuity a premium good for this particular game.

I had actually kind of been hoping Wardle would have the same idea and that I would at some point be able to pay a few dollars a year for an account I could sign into to keep my Wordle career in sync. It looks like that account will now be an NYT account, and while it won't make me a subscriber by itself, it's one more benefit to weigh in potentially subscribing at some point.

Sync makes sense. Otherwise if I switch between mobile and desktop I might lose my streak!

It could simply be content for their offering. Like when Netflix buys the right to a movie, they don't inject ads into it, it simply makes a Netflix subscription marginally more enticing.

And for the NYT, a company that made a $55M profit last quarter, it's probably a good bet.

I pay for the NY Times Crossword app subscription (at least some months when I travel a lot). I havent paid for news subscription in about a year.

Could see there being a daily free Wordle and then a paid app with a few more variants/archives.

The NYT daily mini crossword is free. I bet they just want easy, habit forming things to get people to check their site once a day. Add a 6-wordle for subscribers or something and it fits in perfectly.

Not that much addery on https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/game/mini

I disagree. In fact I'd say no one comes to wordle just to play a word game for 5 minutes and then forget about it. People share their solution grids all over the internet and private groups. They discuss their strategies and favorite start words. Late night hosts all play it on their shows. There's a new Wordle meme trending on Twitter every day. Heck people are so passionate about it that online backlash forced Apple to remove clones from the App Store and Twitter to remove bots that post spoilers – in under a day.

> In fact I'd say no one comes to wordle just to play a word game for 5 minutes and then forget about it.

I do. And I'd be surprised if I'm the only one.

You're not.

Sure you aren't the only one, but looking at real data vs anecdotes (https://morningconsult.com/2022/01/20/wordle-millennials/), 59% of adults and 73% of millennials who play wordle are sharing their results on social media.

If 73% of millennials starting tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?

I told my Mom I solved last night's Wordle in two. That's making conversation about a shared interest. It's the reprehensible worst of this industry to pivot that interest into exploiting it at the source simply because it exists. Put succinctly: in no rational world is my having a conversation with someone about Wordle evidence that it needs a Sign in with Facebook button.

It already has a share button, implemented in probably the most respectful way possible. Absolutely nothing needs to be changed. Wordle is perfect user-respecting technology in any way. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that every change you have in mind to improve it will make it significantly worse because you disagree with my assessment.

If 73% of millennials started tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?

Social media is a communication tool. What you’re seeing is evidence that normal human beings share interests and discuss them. That is not automatic evidence that the interest needs to be technologically exploited at the source. That this is not immediately clear is a significant driver behind the most reprehensible parts of the computing industry. I also think you’re overlooking that “I solved it in four! Yay!” is a mild extension of the anecdotes you’re hearing about five minutes and forget (they’re not mutually exclusive). I bet even the engineers who spent the last couple weekends solving for the optimal word are ready to put that bag down, too, and are probably just as strongly in that five minute group.

It already has a Share button that is implemented in the most respectful way possible for a user. Wordle’s backlog is precisely zero items long. Anything you’d do to it to consider social media would make it fundamentally worse. That you think it’s a social network in waiting leaves a metallic taste in my mouth and a bunch of despair for where we are.

> If 73% of millennials started tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?

This is HN, do you really want to know how that question would be answered?

A question that can only be answered in the form of a VC pitch deck.

> If 73% of millennials started tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?

Isn't that exactly how tiktok was born?

If you could monetize the toilet, you would make a shitload of money.

We have a winner

We could, biogas digestors are a thing :-); we do plumbing is a highly paid profession and people waste enormous amounts of ressources (think of all that water we waste!) to take a crap in "the right environment" even though imo "Turkish" toilets provide a better position for bowel evacuation...

> 59% of adults and 73% of millennials

Weird breakdown choice, again with the infantilizing of millennials. All millenials are adults

My favourite part is that I don't need to care or think about it once I'm done. I can have a nice little puzzle to start the day and then move on.

I can say that it captured my social group precisely because 1) the clipboard-based sharing works just as well in our private chat as it does on Twitter or Facebook and 2) the total lack of ads, monetization, or growth-hacking gimmicks meant that people felt comfortable sharing their results without feeling like they're spamming their friends.

I played it this way. And then I showed my wife and kids. For a few days we played over the family group chat. But now I'm on a group Messages chat with my wife's family (they are all non-techies). They all started playing it independent of us and we just got added to the group.

It's funny how it spreads... the ease of sharing results is what I think has really driven the popularity.

I wonder, for a person who was posting their Wordle solutions to Facebook, Twitter and Discord under accounts that they were trying to keep separate, how many posts it would take to uniquely identify somebody. It must be only a handful, at most.

Anyway, that's a pretty constructed scenario, but it is sorta interesting to think about.

In any case -- fortunately it is NYT, so I bet they'll happily just let it go to a nice stable daily crossword sized population and stick there indefinitely without messing it up. Maybe they can add a 6-wordle for subscribers.

A single day holds at an absolute maximum of 3^30 different combinations but in practice it's probably much less than that because people converge to more green boxes (generally) as they guess more. I'd bet by 3 days though you've provided a unique set of answers.

That's the ballpark I was thinking, too. The only wrench I can think of that might get thrown into it -- there are some known popular starters and popular guessing styles. If you go for, say, ARISE and then hunt vowels, I bet the number of collisions could be strung along a bit longer.

I mean they don't come to Wordle to do that they play wordle and go other places. I would not have played it if it wanted me to log in and link my socials or recreate my social graph to share.

When I said people don't go to wordle for a social network I mean wordle comes to whatever social grouping you already have because it's so simple and easy to share. It's not a social network it's a thing people do socially which is vastly different.

No ads, no pay to play, no upgrades, no sign in, no social graph, takes 2 minutes per day, everyone plays the same/one puzzle per day, unwritten rules you don't ruin it for others, etc etc. The perks are great, I hope the NYT doesn't change it. I could take an ad, but changes to anything else might make me stop playing.

They will absolutely change it.

+1 on everything you said, except it takes me more than 2 minutes per day. :D

Me too... was just showing off :)

Vowels are now behind a paywall.

I'd like to buy a vowel..

Well you can't. The best you can do is buy a license to use a vowel up to three times in the present game.

Any subsequent value usage must be repurchased. No trading of vowels.

Vowels on the Blockchain. Each user should be able to earn when they are done with the vowels they've purchased

There will be one ad but it will be Punch the Monkey and it will hover over the keyboard until you go to type. It will then move to the row below the one you are guessing.

Plus, the "share" mechanism is obviously not an invasion of privacy or a tracking beacon. It just puts a cute unicode game board in your clipboard, as far as I can see.

Thanks, I didnt realize those shares were text and wondered how to export them. How cool!

Yeah they're just unicode emojis really simple to do and a big part of the popularity imo. From discord, twitter or whatsapp I can easily share and compare with a bunch of different groups of friends.

Once one sees that mechanism, it cannot be forgotten. Wide knowledge of the technique is among Wordle's gifts to the world.

If the NYT only adds a link to their home page on the share function it has been worth it for them, millions of impressions per day for almost 0 cost.

Looking through the rest of NYT games, I can see this becoming a pay to play thing pretty soon.

> No ads, no pay to play, no upgrades, no sign in, no social graph

yet.

> I could take an ad

Why?

There is objectively nothing that NYT could add to the game to make it more interesting. It can only make it worse.

They could serve the correct words from server side so that it's not trivial to find them.

The original creator was not able to do that due to infrastructure limitations, but surely NYT would have the proper setup to handle that.

It always loads fast. Quite a nice feature..

Again, how does that improve the game?

For context, a Twitter bot was recently banned for automatically replying to Wordle tweets and spoiling the next day's word. Preventing that would improve the gameplay experience by defending against malicious disruption.

We know that wordle is completely trivial for computers to solve. Hiding the solutions won’t do anything to stop that particular behavior.

The game is perfect as is, and I’m sad that it will now be used to make money.

Not really. The bot can get its data from when NZ hits midnight, hours and hours before America and Europe etc. Even if it was always released at the exact same time globally, nothing to stop a bot solving it / fetching it immediately and replying to users posts from yesterday about what todays one is.

Is this to stop you from cheating?

So the fun word game stops working while commuting by train because it needs to stop me "cheating" in a purely fun /social game by phoning home during the time I have to play it, where the connection is spotty at best, and the quick game loop of guess, read result, think gets janked because of railway cuttings and tunnels?

All because someone coukd read the source to cheat and wouldn't, idk, just copy paste the squares about in their tweets?

Exactly. It's somewhat baffling to me how some people focus so much on the technology aspects of something to the point of forgetting that its success is due to the things that it does not do.

I don't see a point of this. I could probably find the correct word for today by Googling so server/client side does not make any difference if we all share the same word for the day which is I think the major feature behind the success.

I'm expecting ads and also a hyperlink in the sharing copypasta at the very least.

> takes 2 minutes per day

I feel stupid.

Nah, you can actually solve it really fast if you have a few goto starting words. I use house, trail and one more I can't remember now. Longest I ever spent since then on Wordle has been maybe 3 minutes.

Dharmesh Shah (hubspot founder) built a tool called FirstWord that ranks word choices. https://firstword.com/

The minute NYT starts to mess with it, clones are going to pop like mushrooms.

Um...

https://rwmpelstilzchen.gitlab.io/wordles/

The NYTimes mobile app has a section at the very bottom of the scroll with 5(+1) games. The +1 is for the crossword puzzle, which is included in mini form whole the full chonker requires its own subscription. I image they are going to give wordle top billing in the section. Maybe there'll be a page anyone can visit, but I think they'll use it to keep subscribers returning to the app daily, having to scroll past something they'll want to read on their way, seeing some adds and giving them one more reason not to stop the renewal charges.

The question is: would anyone pay low seven figures just for the privilege of hiding the same thing? They'd expect this investment to return few times. They'd either start pushing "better" (different) version to subscribed people, splitting the community. Or, as you mentioned, introduce ads. But I don't think just acquiring a channel to display ads was the goal (the article mentions the goal to grow subscriber base), because it's a fad that will fade away- good chances are this will happen before they manage to show enough ads to recoup the initial investment.

And even as nice as it is it's not going to sustain this level of hype for more than another couple of weeks.

Probably worked out as a better monetization strategy than slapping AdSense on it...

I dunno... didn't the Flappy Bird guy throw AdSense on there and start making $40k/day?

I believe mobile ads bring in much more revenue than web ads

How do you monetize a game that already has an ad-less web version which works 100% offline and has hardcoded enough words to continue working until 2028? I can literally "save as" the html and the js bundle, put them in a folder, and play it every day until 2028 without any problems. Let alone the thousands of free rip offs out there.

I have to assume this figure is for the name alone.

I'd have bought the name, the canonical url, the wordlist, and probably most importantly the blessing of the creator.

(Oh, and the code and doco, on the off chance that re using it was easier than re implementing it in my web property.)

Did the dev had some copyright/patents on the game? Why didn't the NY Times just clone it? Surely they could have leverage their users to start to use their version?

They are buying the audience, like HN or Reddit.

Uh oh, is NYT coming for HN next?

No, they don't want our kind.

they didn't buy a simple app, they bought several million dailies. Good luck cloning that.

I agree it's cheap. Maybe the creator didn't wanted to engage into a complicated negotiation and sold.

The creator probably didn't break his back making it, already has a job, and probably has reddit equity that will make him money when they IPO.

I would've for sure taken the first good offer for my project in that case.

"low seven figures" might not quite be "fuck off money", but it's without doubt "life changing money" for almost everyone.

No matter _how_ emotionally attached I was to a side project, if you offered me a few million for it I would sign in an instant.

Low seven figures is fuck off money for the vast majority of people in the USA. I would conservatively guess >90%.

what is a social network? It is just user accounts, no connections.

I think that the NYT could have cloned it without any legal problems so this was just to avoid the PR problem in doing so.

Cloning it wouldn't have got them the publicity. They'll be in news bulletins around the world. They'll own the name and trade dress, I bet they can sell enough merch alone by Christmas to pay for the acquisition.

This game is a passing fad, not a sustainable business.

Most current users will get bored and move on to something else.

Most of the worth is probably in people that can put up a successful product.

> dedicated daily user base in the millions

I don't know if you can describe a userbase that has existed for less than a month as "dedicated." Let's see where it is in three months. Not that I wish the designer ill, quite the opposite. I think it's very smart of them to sell and cash in on the fad. Get while the getting is good.

The site has a lot of potential but developing that potential is a lot of work. "in the low seven figures" is a nice payday. The guy can probably retire and have the freedom to do whatever he wants. Good for him...

I don't think it's all that cheap. The NYT acquisition makes sense to me, and it makes sense to me that he could spend a lot more time on the app and make (more) money with it directly. But I don't see the option (3) of some other 7-8 figure acquirer, just because the NYT already has a business unit that you can drop word games into and print money out of, and nobody else really does at the same level.

I would guess he has an earnout and will be a nytimes employee for a few years.

Why would they need him? Not like it's hard to integrate.

Really? What price would you put on it?

Don't forget the value of the IP "Wordle" i the hands of the NYT properties the brand can be extended ad nauseam: games, swag, print games....

Whether it will have that many users in a few months is anyone's guess.

This feels kinda like the flappy bird craze, albeit a little less silly...

Hey specializes in something called crosswords and they have sudoku service seems like an obvious purchase

>the hottest new social network

Am I out of my mind? Isn't wordle just a faddy little mobile game?

No, you're not. I think the OP got carried away. Few years back everything new with at least minimal social touch was "New Social Network"

Link to the game: https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

Pretty fun. If you read his homepage https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/ he mentions he created Reddit's "The Button" and "Place" April Fools games. Dude's pretty creative.

The Button was pretty cool. I really love the UX on Wordle. Can't really explain why but it's just so pleasant to use.

I didn't understand what the button was and pushed it right away lol

The letter flipping reveal is a key component that adds to the joy of Wordle.

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.

> of course, I pretty much expect the NYT to fuck that up, but oh well, that always happens over time

They have a number of free games that don't require any kind of account or registration. I am optimistic that they won't introduce any unsavory elements to it and turn off the playerbase it's amassed.

Take a look: https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords

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.

Sorry, I beg to differ. I just clicked on your link and tried the Spelling Bee game. Started playing, after I hit my fifth word the game terminated and I got a popup:

You’re good at this! Know more words? Subscribe to reach our Genius ranking.

With a subscribe button.

I don't blame NYT for doing this, at all. If you pay millions of dollars for something, you expect a return. But this kind of "stop what you were interested in doing right when it starts becoming fun so you can subscribe" is exactly the type of annoying shit I was talking about.

The button was one of the best internet experiments I’ve ever experienced

Gotta be creative to work for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSCHF (according to his LinkedIn).

Note that you can basically save the website locally and since it has the full 2300 word list hard coded in the JS bundle, you can technically keep playing offline until 2028.

The chosen word list index is modulo its length, meaning you can play forever as long as you don't mind running into some repetition :)

Good point, and hopefully in 6 years you'll have forgotten what the initial words were!

Those two projects were by far the best April Fool games on reddit, with Place being one of my favorite internet events ever.

I don't remember Place but I do remember The Button. It was extremely original. Both things were extremely social in nature. Creative mind indeed.

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.

It’s not so dire because you can continue to play “classic” Wordle forever — or well 2028 at least. It’s a static, front-end only app with a predetermined word list iterating in order.

I'd imagine NYT could technically copyright strike anyone that hosts it, given that they've now bought the copyright to that particular arrangement of words. I wonder if it will come to that. This has an "Ethereum Classic" feel to it...

Is this confirmed? I'd would think that NYT would require him to take it down as part of the purchase.

If its static, you can just download it to your laptop and there isn't anything NYT could do to prevent you from playing it locally.

Wait. You can download this game?? And, would it still function as once a day?

Yes, the entire app is in the front end. It's not talking to a server to get new words of the day or checking answers. When you click the link and the game loads, it just loaded everything you needed to play it now, tomorrow, or some day in 2025.

You just need the index.html file and the main.[bundle_hash].js file. You can scrape out the Google Tag Manager import from index.html if you want, though I didn't check to see what tracking it was importing (probably basically analytics).

But so long as you have those two files in a folder, you can open index.html and it'll work fine. My friends and I have been putting in joke words in a shared clone for each other and hosting it on GitHub Pages.

Or you can play this fully functional IPFS mirror:

https://bafybeic4blel5vf4il73n3nzt6vw7npsov6or3cp3myjms4npii...

It's a static, client-side app with no server component, so it's not surprising that someone noticed that it works just as well if the same files are served from IPFS.

Sadly, the social component of wordle is a big part of it, and that URL looks like something the average person would be scared of giving them a virus.

Not disagreeing with you about appearances, but in reality it's not any riskier than any other web site you might visit.

Someone could create a friendlier URL via Cloudflare's public IPFS gateway and DNSLink[0], though that does introduce a potential point of failure (DNS). (Those with the IPFS Companion extension or the Brave browser would be redirected to their local IPFS node, so it would only be partly dependent on Cloudflare. However, someone has to pay for the domain.)

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/distributed-web/ipfs-gatew...

I mean I just downloaded it in Chrome, turned off my internet, and it worked fine.

NYT isn’t that dumb. Nobody would play this game behind a paywall…

Based on their reporting the past couple of years I wouldn’t be confident estimating the depth of their stupidity

Bad politics articles, while bad, are usually favors to their sources.

Obvious favor to sources hurt their credibility gravely.

When I think NYT, I think "mouthpiece of the powerful" not "hard hitting investigative reporting"

Microsoft paywalled Solitaire, never underestimate corporate greed.

It’s free though…

$15/yr for the premium version that removes ads. The original game that doesn't connect to the internet is removed from newer versions of Windows.

Buying a property and milking it fast enough to get a return before its full dead isn't "dumb" per se. Some companies have it as their core business model.

I think they will be that dumb. Or rather greedy.

(Is there a term like hanlon's razor for "never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by greed"?)

A vestige of the old web. Now there will be tons of tracking and 20 MB of Javascript to download.

An example of the internet providing something for users and instead of being leveraged against them so that someone can line their pockets. I can't blame the guy for selling out to the NYT (I'd have done it myself), but it's sad to see how quickly greed takes over to ruin a good thing.

I still don't get why hacker news hates subscriptions so much. the NYT is always producing content so it has constant costs, everyone hates ads / they might now pay enough - so subs are the next best option?

The NYT has been the paper of record in the US for a very long time. To me, the strategy just seems very short sighted.

There is no doubt in my mind that the paywall will ultimately lead to the paper’s decline. The prestige of The NYT as an institution is that everyone reads it. That cannot be the case on the Internet when competing with voluminous free content.

At the very least, all the frontpage articles should not be paywalled. Even historically one could read the most important Times’ articles just glancing at a newsstand.

That's also how it works today, right? You can look at the front page for free, but you need a subscription if you want to read full articles.

There is a scan of the frontpage but it’s not legible.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/pages/pageone/sc...

I get paywalled on the first article on nyt.com.

That's a scan of the printed version. You can look at the front page (nytimes.com) for free, but you need a subscription if you want to read more free articles than a limit allocated to non-subscribers. "Paywalled" means you can't read the full article, it's hidden or truncated.

The front page of the printed edition has 5 full paragraphs.

The web version shows a headline and one sentence.

Those are links to articles, not the full articles themselves. Similar to the "continued on page x" in the printed version, you will need to go to the full article to read its contents.

Because it limits the content to only people who read enough NYT to be worth the subscription cost to them. It doesn't match most people's use case of bumping into a NYT article once in a while.

Subscriptions are an overused pricing model. Businesses love subscriptions because they love recurring revenue. The desire for RR pushes businesses to pursue products the fit the revenue model rather than solving customer problems. Consumers notice their bills stacking up with subscriptions and start to question the value they're getting for their subscription fees.

Some examples off the top of my head:

1. Grubhub's Plus, https://www.grubhub.com/plus

2. The majority of streaming services

3. Stitch Fix's recurring fix

4. Video game industry subscriptions (too many to dig into)

NYT's slavish devotion to a subscription model follows this pattern. They want to get subscriptions so they structure offerings to fit. Compare to a platform like Substack, where they offer a rich ecosystem with just a few different price models. I've believed for some time that news media like NYT overvalue their current offerings and need to innovate. Doesn't seem like they're interested.

Don't take my statement to claim all subscription offerings are bereft of value. Simply that there are so many lazy offerings that subscriptions are better as a signal of waste than value.

Excellent comment

The NYT hasn't done anything yet, but why wouldn't people (here or anywhere else) be disappointed to see something they enjoyed that was free and easy to access suddenly become pay-walled off, plastered with ads, and used to mine their personal data?

Nice job to the developer, this is probably the perfect time to sell. Honestly, I could imagine the price dropping by half in a few weeks as the fad dies down.

Let NYT figure out how to monetize a simple easily copied game like this. I don't envy the team who is responsible for making this deal profitable for them.

This seems to fit very nicely into the set of mini games they sell a separate subscription to. And if their own claims are to be believed it seems that they have already successfully monetized them https://www.nytco.com/press/both-cooking-and-games-reach-1-m...

Meh, other than the crossword, the other ones are fairly trivial games. Simon Tatham's puzzle pack [0] for example has 5x more games for free and ported to most platforms.

[0] https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

They have a games subscription that people like me pay for. I'd just consider this adding a bit of value to an already solid subscription.

The NYT makes money from paid subscriptions. Anything that increases the virality of their subscriber acquisition is going to make back a whole bunch of money. There are lots of people that subscribe to the NYT principally for the games, which Wordle fits into nicely.

This deal makes perfect sense for NYT. I don't see it making sense for a lot of other companies (they don't already have an engine that you can stick games into and get subscriber dollars out of, and building that engine will swamp the cost of Wordle itself), but here, sure.

Hasbro would have been another one: stick it next to the sales page for Scrabble, pretty strong audience overlap I would think, and they have an instant winner due to the reduced marketing costs.

NYT has been charging separately and extra for access to their word games online for years. 'tptacek's explanation isn't wrong, it just undersells it by a lot - word games have been an NYT premium sub business since before their news digital sub business took off.

I did not mean to imply that he was wrong, merely that from the sellers point of view there may have been other options.

Oh I meant it as - he's slightly-wrong-by-omission. NYT are (somewhat weirdly) the OG online word game hustlers.

NYT has already monetized simple word games. Their puzzle subscription is very popular.

Does this mean as soon as I enter my second guess, I'm going to have a huge overlay to sign in to a New York Times account?

> The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players

> initially

Can't wait to phone them up to try and unsubscribe from my Wordle account some day.

I'm guessing it'll be bundled with their Spelling Bee and Crossword games, which is a separate subscription (and also easily cancelled).

The unsubscribe process has become easier. Last time I unsubscribed–a few months ago–I didn't have to talk to anyone, not on phone and not via online chat.

Set your address to California when you buy your Wordle subscription

"Free" does not mean free from advertising and upsell.

Think of all the brands with 5 letter names!

OREOS will be the answer once a week.

Hah, I've seen that so many times now... are you a regular NYT crossword solver, too?

Are you serious? They sneak brand names into crosswords?

I'm actually not sure if you're serious or not, but yes there are brand names in NYT crossword puzzles. No, they don't get paid for it.

OREO is a famous one because it's a short vowel heavy word, and can more easily fit into puzzles. Because of that, it shows up quite often in puzzles.

Eliminating brand names, or any significant category of words, would probably hurt the quality of the crosswords. What's next? No movie references in the clues if the answer is an actor?

> No movie references in the clues if the answer is an actor?

I would welcome that. Let's leave the actors and athletes out of the crosswords.

So no pop culture references at all?

Jeez that sounds like an extremely boring crossword.

There's some people who want that. I hate names when there's too many since I'll end up getting Naticked, but I certainly wouldn't want them gone!

I was wondering the insidious way they would monetize but I think you nailed it.

Drink Your Ovaltine

It also won't work in private/incognito mode.

Yes, that is the day I stop playing wordle even though I’m a NYT crossword subscriber.

Isn't the site entirely static, including the word list and daily answer? You should be able to download a local copy for yourself and play that from now on.

or build your own! The whole thing seems like a great "learn to program" type problem.

Out of genuine curiosity - would you mind sharing your thinking?

You clearly don't mind paying the NYT for game content historically, and enjoy the game you're playing to this point - and even more than that, you're already paying and will presumably continue to get Wordle even if it eventually gets locked behind the subscription you hold. Why the line in the sand?

In a similar boat. Wordle is a social game for my little friend group, if the whole group isn’t doing it there’s really no point.

What exactly are the NYT buying here? Are they buying the traffic which must be quite large. Or are they buying users? Surely Wordle is a passing fad and, in a year, will retain less than 40% of all players playing right now. After that, how many are going to buy a NYT subscription based on this.

They could have gotten Wordle recreated in less than a week. iirc NYT used to employ Rich Harris of Svelte fame so I would imagine they have the developer skills to recreate Wordle.

Are they buying a brand? How can they make money off it?

Is this a marketing/advertising play?

They're buying the right to slap "like this game? try our other ones! you'll love the $39.95/year crossword!" on the top of the real Wordle.

they're buying ad-space.

> Surely Wordle is a passing fad and, in a year, will retain less than 40% of all players playing right now.

I think you are off by two orders of magnitude, at least.

The entire pandemic has been full of these flash-in-a-pan shared experiences.

I don't get this purchase either.

What else? This is the only one that I am aware of.

NFTs are another example

Off the top of my head sourdough, Clubhouse, everything on TikTok, Animal Crossing, Amongus…

TikTok is definitely still going stronger than ever. Clubhouse on the otherhand was valued at $4b somehow and has now been cloned by every other social media platform.

I think OP means the trends that fall in and out of favor on TikTok itself.

I don't think I'd call "massively popular cult following series of games that's been around since 2004" a "pandemic flash in the pan", really.

AC has a solid, hardcore userbase. That it sold 35m units and most of those quit by summer 2020 is normal for any game. No game lasts forever unless you really like it.

TikTok is a behemoth and just keeps growing.

A lot of people still play Among Us and like it. Malls are full of Among Us t-shirts and plushies.

I'll give you Clubhouse though.

Clubhouse was cloned as Twitter Spaces and everyone moved there. It's still being used by its audience of weirdo business coaches and NFT people.

That's most things, though. There's so much crap out there, most people keep moving to the next hot thing rather than keep consuming the same thing. How many people are still watching the Avengers Endgame movie today? Or season 8 of Game of Thrones? Probably roughly the same amount (proportionately) that are still playing Animal Crossing or Among Us today.

Animal Crossing did just get a major update that was well-received and tied to a premium Nintendo Online subscription a few months ago, btw. Still popular enough for that. Definitely nowhere as huge as it was two years ago though.

Animal Crossing was the perfect thing to be released when everyone was stuck in their homes at the start of the pandemic, though, as it offered an escape and even had a 'travel to an island' theme to it. My wife and a bunch of my friends put several hundred hours into it, and I put 55 hours into it, which is about three times as much as an Animal Crossing game usually gets out of me.

Among Us still has its fans. I join a group every once in a while that sets up monthly game nights for it. That one has dropped quite a bit though. Eventually the game was unofficially made into a game mode in Fortnite, from what I hear, and I think that game mode gets played more within Fortnite now than the Among Us game does, but I'm not really sure.

It's also not too far removed and most likely inspired by social deduction board games that have existed and have been popular since the Werewolf/Mafia game from 1986, which Among Us is basically an action Werewolf with minigames and cute, marketable characters.

Tiktok is larger than ever, that seems like a bad one to include. Sourdough was legit flash in the pan, I think.

NYT crossword is the best word puzzle game app I've found. They're adding another notch to that. Expect revenue model to be similar to what they're already doing. 1 free a day, sub to get more words(along with more of all the other games they have).

I mean, it was relatively cheap.

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.

> My guess is they've been hearing about it a ton from their crossword userbase and wanted the traffic, users, and IP.

I'm sure that they've been hearing a lot about it internally from their own crossword people as well. This probably had a lot of internal buy-in.

It's probably a similar user base to the daily NYT mini crossword. I can imagine it having a similar pay structure too -- free daily, paid archive.

> It's probably a similar user base to the daily NYT mini crossword.

I would bet there's not a lot of overlap - Wordle is pretty much the antithesis of a crossword to me. Small number of guesses, each guess gives you more information towards the answer, and it's probably no more than 5 minutes for a game.

I spend more time on the daily Wordle than the daily NYT mini crossword. NYT mini crossword is often a 30-40 second game.

And my comment was totally anecdotal. Everyone that I know that does the NYT crosswords also does Wordle.

Same here

Still a word game, so it probably resonates with the same crowd. Just a guess though.

Absolutely. It's not the same sort of challenge as a crossword puzzle, but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable to have a different kind of word game.

Also, I don't get GP's point about each guess giving more info. Filling in crossword answers also gives more info for everything it crosses.

> Filling in crossword answers also gives more info

Yeah, fair point, but...

> for everything it crosses.

Whereas in Wordle, every step is more info about the single answer - much more efficient. But I definitely should have worded it better - you're absolutely correct.

NYT does also have some simpler games, like basic pattern matching. They might view Wordle as a good gateway from those to the mini crossword.

The main difference is that with Wordle there is very little "marginal creativity" required for each new puzzle. It's literally just another 5-letter word.

The odd thing is they are not buying any IP.

The game itself is a clone of other games decades earlier, and the name is also non original.

Still not sure what they bought.

The userbase, and a redirect from the current location[1] to the New York Times' branded website.

[1]: https://powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle

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.

If they kept everything just about as is except maybe a small NYT logo at the top and an update of the complete screen, I.e. "Next word in 13 hrs 37 minutes; meanwhile try our crosswords (enticing link)" then that would be a big win.

Did you see the backlash to the knockoff apps that popped up? A cheeky milly or two is cheaper than a boycott

You're all overthinking this.

The Times crossword is a lot of fun for a lot of people. So is Wordle.

The Times bundles these with other games in their game subscription.

Let's say a 200,000 English speakers around the world pay 5 bucks a month for it. Let's say Wordle pushes that to 250,000 due to the extra exposure. Within a year they've recouped their expenses. Everyone wins.

Except the game is played by millions and will inevitably be played by many fewer in this scenario. People can trivially make clones but it won't be the same as part of the fun is that it's the same word for everyone, and I assume copying the day's word would be even more legally dubious than copying the gameplay.

So in that scenario, I don't think "everyone wins". A free, universal bit of fun will have become a paid, niche thing for NYT subscribers. The vast majority of (continuing and former) players will have lost something.

I don't at all begrudge the developer taking the opportunity to cash in, but if this is what the NYT do I certainly will resent their part in it. It's a bit of mild fun that doesn't need to be "monetised".

The crossword comparison is a bad one, btw. The setting of each crossword is a separate skilled, creative act. Not many people can do it, and those that do deserve to be paid for it. There is practically zero daily effort in running Wordle, just static hosting and choosing a word each day.

I don't expect wordle to change at all. The site will probably become NYT themed and try to push you to download the crossword app. Daily puzzle will still be free on the app and site. They just want more people in their puzzle ecosystem.

I hope you're right, but the NYT article isn't very promising. It says "The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players," and then spends the rest of the article talking about how their business is all about subscriptions.

They've paid over a million for it. It'll be nice if they keep it unchanged but I doubt they will.

Something good and valuable is offered for free for a time. Then it stops being offered for free. I'm sorry, but we don't get to be mad.

There are a bazillion free (probably free forever) clones. Choose your favorite.

I said that I don't resent the dev cashing in, and I said why the clones aren't a substitute.

Your comment amounts to "that's how it is, deal": zero information content, just an expression of a rather ugly attitude. I know that's how it is and whether I choose to be mad at NYT for it is entirely up to me. The fact that someone made money doing something doesn't oblige me to not think they're a dick for doing it.

Talking of which, whether the NYT do in fact make any money out of this remains to be seen. By buying it for 7 figures they've set themselves a high bar for that. It's entirely possible they'll end up having messed up something people were enjoying and lost both money and goodwill in the process. Kudos to the dev whatever happens, though.

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.

>so I would imagine they have the developer skills to recreate Wordle

To be fair, I think most averagely skilled developers could copy Wordle within a very short time. I am very much reminded of the game 2048 though. While it definitely was a fad too, it still has a huge base of players even now. So maybe the NY Times sees some potential there.

2048 was a ripoff of Threes[1]. While clones were inevitable, it was a shame to see their thunder stolen so quickly.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threes

That's disingenuous. While they are both sliding matching games, the end result is quite different. I actually preferred 2048 to Threes. It was much more relaxed and casual.

If anything, Threes made it big thanks to 2048. I would never have heard of it and bought it otherwise.

IIRC the author of 2048 decided not to monitise it because he based it on Threes, and only wrote it to see if he could write a game from scratch in a weekend.

I think NYT cloning wordle would have had a huge backlash. Lots of bad PR, a wave of protest cancellations, etc. If they wanted Wordle in the app this was the best way to do it.

Perhaps they're buying the ability to trademark "Wordle"

I can think of 3 ways that the NYT intends to profit off of this.

1) embed a link to times puzzles into the boilerplate "share" feature. 2) embed enticing pictures of other puzzles that the NYT owns in the actual game page itself. 3) embed links to wordle from existing puzzles, with the hope of preventing people from clicking away from the times collection of puzzles.

Seems like a steep price for all of this though.

> Surely Wordle is a passing fad

I mean, I do think games come and go, but I think Wordle is some really solid design. It's paced and measured and feel like a mature experience, even though it's new.

NYT could absolutely clone the gameplay - it would be easy - but I think they would rightly be hounded by people attacking them for stealing the game. Instead, they settle on a reasonable (but low) purchase price that probably includes some consulting on how to expand the game, get the blessing of the original creator, and have a feel-good story about adopting and expanding a game people like.

Like, this is a good fit for the NYT "word game collection" brand, but because of the popularity they have to be careful about how they integrate it. I'm sure they paid a bit more than they wanted to, but not actually too much more than it would take to develop a clone, and what they really pay for is protecting against bad press. Seems fine to me.

> Are they buying a brand?

Ding ding ding!

The term wordle is very recognizable and a great way to introduce people to the nytimes games collection, which other than the crossword aren't well known

When wordle first started to rise in popularity, I saw a lot of comments that the one-a-day format was too limiting, and people would get bored and forget about the site because one puzzle doesn't offer enough engagement. I think that actually it had the opposite effect, keeping people coming back every day. It just goes to show that what people say they want, and what actually works, can be very different.

> I think that actually it had the opposite effect

That's my feeling too - it's quick and cheerful. You know you can fire it up and be done ~5 minutes later with a nice little thing to post onto $SOCIALOFCHOICE and no need to think about it again for 24 hours.

That was my experience. Somebody posted a clone here very early on that let you play as many times as you liked. I think I did 3 or 4 in a row and never went back. I still wordle every day, though. Sometimes scarcity is nice.

I feel the same about TV series, I tend to value more and be more mindful of content that is released weekly, than released at once for for binging. Later, makes me loathe it

Paraphrasing you: Scarcity makes you value things more, sometimes in a good way.

The important thing is getting the dosage right. I feel like it's hard to get immersed in a show where I see one episode per week. I also find myself forgetting minor characters and suspect that I don't make as many subtle connections when I watch weekly. One wordle per day seems to be optimal, though - you get your fix but it maintains its freshness.

I think the shared puzzle and mystery aspect is what made it take off. You could gloat or moan very easily and everyone who played knew exactly what you were trying to guess and could compare.

For those of you thinking and commenting this was sold too cheap: that's a life changing amount of money right that, you won't be able to spend it if you play it smart. Keep in mind that wordle went from a cost to a net + for the dev in a very short time, and that there was no business model.

Don't give up the day job, buy a chunk of real estate and 'level up' in one go based on a happy accident, this is found money. And if you think it is worth 10's of millions then you probably should have made a deal with the author yourself, easy money, right?

Better a deal at a lower than optimal valuation than no deal at the best possible price.

This thing may go down as fast as it went up, better to capitalize on it while it's hot.

It's enough to buy a small house!

That's life changing to a very large chunk of the population who don't make SV IT person money.

Indeed, a solitary exclamation mark cannot convey my feelings here. For much of my life, I've watched housing grow faster than my income, and I had pretty much given up on the notion before I met my current partner... with two tech incomes, it's actually within our reach. As a kid (circa 1990), we'd play "what would you do with a million dollars" with all sorts of fantastical notions, and as the years have gone by, the answer settled on "a house" and has now reached "a small house in a crappy location." Perhaps "a down payment on a nice place." I'm both happy for the creator, and sad about the reality of realty.

Same here. I make pretty good money, but compared to what this would have meant 20 years ago it is just enough to take care of my pension by the time I retire.

At the same time: if it were 20 years ago and/or the inflation wouldn't have been as high then this deal - and my income - would be that much lower.

So I guess it doesn't matter as much as it seems but it feels pretty weird to be 'rich' by my old standards but unable to have the work effectively for me.

> that's a life changing amount of money right that

If it's taxed like regular income, at $2.5M, ~$925,000 goes to Federal taxes, $200,000 to NY State.

Like any other form of income. If he would have tried to monetize Wordle a large chunk of the users would have jumped ship for some free clone (which will take a couple of days to whip up).

I'd say this was a smart move, and if he makes a good, leveraged play with that million it will either change his life on the spot or a few years down the line (but then in a bigger way). Such windfalls don't happen twice in a lifetime, but when they do it is an instant opportunity to level up.

I can imagine trying to squeeze that much or more from it as an independent project would be a long haul even before considering the uncertainty of it. And it might also not be everybody's jam.

Getting the 7-figure money presumably upfront AND also the freedom to move on to something that isn't "try to monetize Wordle", sounds like an incredible deal.

Money in the bank beats pie in the sky.

The problem with deals like this is that you never really know how many opportunities there are and how much time you have. Turning that uncertainty into a certainty is already an advantage all by itself.

We have a neat proverb about this in Dutch: "wie het onderste uit de kan wil krijgt het lid op z'n neus", the translation of which is "if you want to the get the last bits from the pot you'll get the lid on your nose".

Can't wait for the godawful monetization.

Congrats to the creator, I would've done the same.

Congrats to Josh for a 7 figure payout - I just hope it remains as barrier-free as it does now.

Wordle could be an effective free feeder into NYT’s more complex games and the game subscription. I hope they don’t inhibit that.

I think the New York Times got the perfect price for it, given that half the comments in this thread are "wow, that's a lot cheaper that I expected", and that the other half are "wow, that's a ridiculous windfall for just a few days of work".

I remember when almost everyone here was against his choice to not monetize from the first day. Instead he released a user friendly app, no ads, no trackers. Great success, massive user base, huge money.

Well played.

7 figures for a solo dev game of such small scope is amazing, people here have way too high expectations. Most indie games make $0-10000

Raises hand solo game dev here that's never gotten above $10k revenue for a game I've released.

7 figures for something this tiny is amazing.

Working on a game in my spare time that's still small but significantly more ambitious in features, with 3D graphics, animations, Twitch streamer features, cosmetic game unlocks, possibly online multiplayer support, etc, but starting to wonder if I shouldn't try just knocking out a few small puzzle game ideas I've been sitting on for forever and do my best to incorporate some of the natural viral mechanisms that were in Wordle (not really possible with those games to post different types of solutions and still not give it away though, that's a big part of Wordle's virality).

The conspiracy theorist in me suggests this is a long winded way to prevent people from clearing their history to circumvent the free article limit, lest they lose their Wordle score.

The technologist in me suggests he’s right.

Same thought here. Now we just need a browser extension that can maintain your Wordle history after you clear cookies and history.

A well-timed X (stop page load) click can let you read as many NYT articles as you want.

Considering Zynga paid over $50 million to buy Words With Friends [1] back in 2011, the price seems awfully low. Then again, who knows, maybe the creator is simply indifferent to worldly gain, considering he didn't even bother to include a URL in the social share string simply because it looked "trashy." [2]

[1]: https://venturebeat.com/2011/07/05/zynga-paid-53-3m-to-buy-w...

[2]: https://www.famitsu.com/news/202201/07247076.html

Here goes the private, ad-free experience. Hopeful Wardle sold it under certain conditions considering he didn’t monetize when he had the chance.

I know it’ll remain like it was for some time but eventually be monetized.

> Wordle was acquired for an undisclosed price in the low-seven figures.

Looks like he found a pretty solid monetization strategy.

A link to a html5 app in the App store on the wordle site would have made a lot more than that.

That would literally make $0. What are you talking about? Where is the revenue coming from?

A lot of people would have paid a dollar to have it in an "App". I know you can add a shortcut on iOS but it isn't easy to find and people would pay to have Wordle in their "games" folder.

https://wordhoot.com/ is a really good Wordle alternative that's private and ad-free.

I like the one-a-day idea, and that it's the same for everyone.

However, the game itself is exactly the same as 'Lingo' - an old US show that still has a UK version airing right now. It has also had its own app for a while.

It's amazing how a couple of extra touches can make something explode in popularity.

What are the extra touches for those who never played Wordle?

Well, there's no timer in wordle whereas in lingo you are against the clock. You only get to play one puzzle a day.The solution is the same for the whole world every day.

Part of its success is the simplicity I think, and the fact you don't need an app.

I think the real thing that made it go viral are the "certificates" it gives you for solutions, which get shared on social media:

https://www.kaggle.com/benhamner/wordle-1-6

While that is a part of it, I have also heard that the virality was somewhat forced by journalists writing about wordle endlessly: as fans of word games themselves, journalists boosted its popularity in the earlier days, driving a lot of the 'viral' traffic.

Can somebody tell me how to generate one of these certificates? I can't find a button on the page at all to do it and I feel like a moron, since everyone and their dog is posting them on Twitter.

In the dialog that shows up after you finish Wordle, click the big green Share button and it's copied to your clipboard

Press the graph icon next to the "WORDLE" on the top of the screen, then press "share"

After successfully solving the daily puzzle, you're presented with a small popup that includes stats and a share button. The share button adds the sequence of emojis to your clipboard.

When it pops up the results dialog after you win, there's a green "Share" button in the bottom right. If you closed the results dialog, you can get it to open again by refreshing the page.

You can also just click the bar graph icon in the top right, next to the settings gear.

If you have an ad blocker on it won’t show

Free. No ads. Accessible to everyone. Convenient build-in share functionality and a common experience (as you mentioned the common daily word). And of course a clean, technically excellent implementation.

If it had a single barrier (install an app, create an account, click through ads, etc), it would have been yet another of countless word games. It was a brilliant confluence for a momentary explosion in popularity.

All along, though, people were yipping about the grand benevolence and moral supremacy of this version versus clones (when the app itself was, as you mentioned, not that derived from an existing game, even aping the coloring), and that all looks pretty silly now that the creator quite rightly managed a pretty lucrative "exit" for a trivial work. And I applaud them for it, and respect the brilliant choices made to get there.

The implementation is so good. Completely client side, which was a stroke of genius when it started getting really popular.

To which UK TV show are you referring? It doesn't ring any bells with me.

It's called Lingo. Apparently it was invented in the USA, but had a bunch of national variants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(American_game_show)

It was pretty popular in the Netherlands as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9959YYGuEBM&t=45s

In the Netherlands it started with 5 letter words, as in Wordle, and later they moved on to 6 letter words for variety. But the principle remains the same.

Pro tip: the entire game is self-contained within the page that you download, so you can take an offline copy - you know, in case it happens to change for the worst in future...

Just heard of Wordle due to this thread. I am not sure if it exists outside of the UK (it must do!) but the mechanics of this game are pretty much the same as the Mastermind board game[0]. Instead of coloured pegs, its 5 letter words. Very cool.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)

With the quite significant difference that the words have to be real words

Can someone explain me how come Wordle can be acquire since it is an implementation of another game called Lingo? Isn't there some copyright or other intellectual property belonging to someone else?

Rules cannot be copyrighted. I can make a Wordle clone right now and as long as I don't reuse assets/names there's nothing they can do about it. See also 2048, which is a clone of 1024, which is a clone of Threes.

Yeah, the similarities with 2048 is uncanny. Too bad Gabriele Cirulli never got a similar buyout.

I'm assuming the name "Wordle" itself is possibly trademarkable..

«“I am a bit suspicious of mobile apps that demand your attention and send you push notifications to get more of your attention,” Wardle told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 [On Jan 5]. “There are also no ads. I’m not doing anything with your data, and that is also quite deliberate as well.”

Wardle, explaining the reasons behind his decision not to monetize Wordle, asked, “Why can’t something just be fun on the internet?”

“I’m fortunate enough. I’m in a position where I’m comfortable. I don’t have to charge people money for this. I don’t begrudge people if they’re making things and charging money for them online. That’s fine. But with Wordle, that was never the goal,” Wardle said. “And I would, ideally, like to keep it that way.”»

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/27/wordle-the-global-phe...

Wardle had a number

The source code and word lists of Wordle is easily accessible, and runs completely client side -- anyone can clone and host their own instance if they want.

https://reichel.dev/blog/reverse-engineering-wordle.html#loo...

Spolier alert. This page discloses the list of words

I don't know the ultimate fate of Wordle, but I'm comforted by the thought of thousands of programmers all over the world creating and hosting their own little versions and sharing them with friends and family. It's so simple that it practically begs to be implemented in whichever language you happen to be dabbling in at the moment.

> Wordle was acquired for an undisclosed price in the low-seven figures.

Did I read that right ? Wordle was valued above 1M. It seems crazy from the outside but I guess I never realized how popular it.

For what it's worth, I haven't played a game consistently for close to 20 years but Wordle stuck like glue for some reason. I've only missed two words in 3 weeks. It's kind of addictive. I might stop tomorrow, who knows, but it's interesting that I'm still returning to it day after day.

I'm notoriously bad at picking up habits too, even if it's something I want to do.

It's addictive but it's also impossible to burn out since it's just one per day.

If it was unlimited I would have likely gotten bored of it day 2.

Absolutely, I would have too. I'd burn 30m on it and totally forget about it.

You should try NYT’s Spelling Bee. I think it also has that daily coming back kind of attraction.

Ha, you're not kidding. That's really fun.

Given their metrics (reportedly ~2M daily actives & growing) it struck me as cheap.

The road to monetize those players and to make let’s say $2M net would be a huge pain in the ass. I would also have just sold and moved on to the fun part of a new project

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.

New York Times will make much more back from Wordle.

It's the new sudoku. It's the new crossword puzzle.

Irrespective of the acquisition, I do not think people will be playing Wordle to the same extent in 6 months - certainly not in 12 months. This is a great exit for Josh to get out at/near the peak of popularity.

Sure, but Wordle was not a startup. It wasn't seeking an "exit". It was a fun project made by a guy for his girlfriend who likes word games. He shared to their family, and it spread. Not everything needs to be or should be viewed from the lens of startup, even if this is YC's HN.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga...

I didn't say anything about it being a startup. The fact that it wasn't a startup, and this guy turned a viral sensation into a lifechanging opportunity, is great.

Your comment referred to Wordle's "acquisition" and "exit", which is startup jargon. I agree it's great he's getting a financial windfall, I just meant that the absence of that outcome — no acquisition/exit, just a fun game — would have also been meaningful and valuable for the world. Linguistic relativity etc etc :)

Glad the guy made bank from it. I'd literally had a few worried minutes about the injustice of making something so viral and it not e.g. translating to more security health and happiness for his family.

How I hope the New York Times improves Wordle:

> The Wordle URL moves to https://newyorktimes.com/wordle. That is all.

How I hope the New York Times monetizes Wordle:

> The Wordle URL moves to https://newyorktimes.com/wordle, and they add a small NY Times logo to the Share page. Clicking it takes you to the newspaper's front page. That is all.

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it?

"On March 21, 2012, Draw Something was bought by the gaming company Zynga for $180 million. The game's popularity peaked on the day of the sale, and the number of daily active users tumbled from 15 million to 10 million by early May."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_Something

> Wordle was acquired for an undisclosed price in the low-seven figures.

This reminds me of another fad (Draw Soemthing). Zynga bought OMGPOP for $200M [1] right at its peak of popularity, shutting it down a year later [2].

Remember another fad: HQ Trivia [3]?

I honestly don't even know what Wordle is. No shade on anyone who enjoys it. I just don't think anyone will be talking about it in 6 months.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/03/21/zynga-acq...

[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/04/zynga-shuts-down-omgpop-on...

[3]: https://productmint.com/what-happened-to-hq-trivia/

Check out out. It's a very simple word game that requires no login. No ads.

You're probably right about it being a temporary fad.

I still enjoy "playing" this every day. I'm down to a 3-4 guess average. I suppose I'll keep playing as long as my Safari Web App continues to function the same as it does today. Once it no longer works or is locked behind a bunch of ads then I'll go back to doing something else for 10-30 mins every morning.

And just like that, the fad passed.

Selling out now was absolutely the smart move unless he had big plans to make some kind of Wordle-themed empire.

Agreed. Sooner or later the fad would have passed anyway.

for what it's worth, I don't think the NYT will "ruin" Worlde. If they roll it into the NYT website there will already be ads and subscription solicitations all around it as part of the normal page UI. The game itself can still be free and relatively uncluttered. I doubt the overall experience will change much and they'll probably make their "low seven figures" back in a relatively short time.

I'm over Worlde, personally. I started when it first showed up on hn a few weeks ago and stopped recently. It was fun, it was a little daily thing. but it's an easy game and I've moved on

Odd that they (understandably) don't disclose what they paid, but then drop the rather unambiguous hint of "lower seven figures." Congratulations to Wardle; not a bad exit for an ingeniously simple web-based game.

It's funny but I've always payed for the NYT crossword subscription even though I tend to only pay for the NYT on the "trial" rate which I think is like $1 a week. I enjoy doing the crossword that much. I like doing the wordle too and would miss it. My day is mostly work so I really enjoy a game that challenges me and helps me get my brain going but also ends so there is no more playing. Crosswords and wordle are great in that regard. Could the NYT be on to something in gaming? I don't know that area but would be keen to know what gaming professionals think.

Soon: SHOW HN: I sold my girlfriends birthday present to NYT for seven figures.

I wonder if girlfriend is going to be given a chunk of those 7 figures.

How does the New York Times have all this capital to spend / invest / burn, while other media companies (especially journalism) are struggling so much just to keep their lights on?

Being publicly traded with a sticky subscription model helps.

NY Times is also part of AMEX's digital entertainment credit, so subscribers print revenue that AMEX reimburses them behind the scenes. NY Times gets to print high revenue numbers anyway, and the public markets trade that a multiple. So NY Times has access to capital to occasionally make a 7 figure purchase. Media properties struggle to find something for a growth strategy but they have access to capital, they just don't expect to continue to have access to capital which makes them have to cut things earlier, expecting gloom and doom.

Because local media is ad-dependent and the NYT makes most of its money on paid subscriptions. Media companies have been trying to pivot to paid subscriptions, but the NYT has for over a decade been premised on paid subscriptions online, during a time period where competing media companies hoped to stay free to subscribers based on ad revenue; they've managed to build a business that is essential enough that 8 million people subscribe to it, including during a long stretch of time where the modal media business strategy was "monetize eyeballs".

NYT did very well under Trump. Basically local news is worthless since no one pays for it since it's expected to be free and seen as "low brow". People don't mind paying to keep democracy strong which is what NYT paints themselves as doing.

IMO, New York is probably the first city most people associate America with, so they've been able to build a global media brand vs your local small town newspaper.

I don't understand how this game can be commercialized. Crosswords actually have to be written and the quality of the game relates to how much effort goes into making it. Anyone with a dictionary file can host a World clone.

Not sayings its a bad game--its a great idea--just don't see what the value is in buying it. I'm not even sure what exactly they bought, it doesn't really have any monetization/userbase/IP.

Comics of the new era. Just a thing which keeps some group of users coming to your site every day. Keeps existing readers happy as they can complete their wordle between reading news. New users trickle in slowly as they complete their wordle in NYT.com so easy to click to new section and get hooked. Just adding nyt.com link to the Share snippet will bring in some number of possible new readers.

The obvious commercialization route I can think of is the following: every time you get a yellow letter you make an NFT; every time you get a green letter you make an NFT. Then you can provide zero knowledge proof to other people that you have all those NFTs, and compound interest over time. For the NYT it's all about supporting artistic expression you see /s

Is the game idea even ownable? I didn't think that board game rulesets were copyrightable, only the graphics.

Can I just host a wordle clone and bot add the NYT's latest word every day at midnight from Twitter? Can you copyright "the english dictionary word that was used on Wordle NYT today"?

I feel like the owner basically is laughing to the bank on this, they've bought.. a domain? The brand "wordle"? Even that?

Sure, you can clone it, but you'd be competing with the well-known brand that's free in somewhere between two weeks and two months. NYT bought a user base that might be into crosswords and spelling bee.

i don't get it.

wordle got popular because NYT publicized it, then they buy it.

why would they buy it? They could've just cloned it in a few days with their team, no?

> why would they buy it? They could've just cloned it in a few days with their team, no?

It would be very obviously the NYT ripped the game off from the original, and that wouldn't look good. They had the money to buy it and did so.

companies rip things off all of the time. purchasing is hardly the only option, or even the best option.

They bought it for low 7 figures, thats a huge bargain. It would have cost them that much in developer time to build it, forget about the marketing.

you have to be joking. you think it would cost 7 figures to recreate wordle?

For a big company like the NYtimes, it would not surprise me. But in any case the built in audience is what they're buying.

In my experience, businesses are wildly capital-inefficient at shipping software.

The personnel needed to ship something in a tech org with 100s or 1000s of employees might look like...

- Front-end developer - Back-end developer - DevOps / Infra - UX/Designer - Product Manager - Engineering Manager - Security, Risk & Compliance, Legal (ensure someone doesn't sue NYT over some mis-worded privacy policy or mis-use of user data)

If project planning occurs in quarters (or half-quarters, for those "nimble" cos), getting the Wordle project green-lit means spending 1/4-1/8th year of salaries/benefits for this squad all-in.

Kudos to the creator for making this sale! Great timing, hope the money is life-changing in the best possible way.

> It would have cost them that much in developer time to build it

I’m not really into the backstory but isn’t this game a quick project of one software engineer in his free time?

What? Even a junior dev could clone Wordle in a day, maybe add a week for polishing the animations and such.

Because that would have been an asshole move. This gets them views, goodwill, and probable revenue stream. In long term probably worth more than what they paid

I'd agree if they don't touch it at all, but since they bought it they're going to monetize it. what difference does it make at that point? do people not go on instagram for shamelessly ripping off snapchat? wordle itself is just a clone of lingo, etc. etc.

I disagree. I think they'll throw it on their already monetized crossword app(they claim to have 1 million subscribers) as a freebee to get people in the door. They might let you do extra words if you have a subscription, but a lot of the beauty of wordle is 1 word per day which creates a strong network.

They could also go the route of "daily word is free, archives are part of the subscription", or similar

Instagram predates Snapchat

Why would anyone play the clone? The real game is free and has the network effect.

goodwill. And he was looking for someone to take over 'running it', surely offloading monitoring it/any kind of server upkeep and a department of NYT games ppl making the clues etc would be helpful at this point. Hats off to him.

You can clone a website but you can’t clone a million people searching “wordle” every day in Google.

So imagine they did clone it then they paid a million dollars in paid traffic to it OR they would simply be preaching to the choir.

A million is probably a fraction of NYT total paid ad spend monthly and look at what they’re getting for that!

It’s a bargain

How is different from 10,000 other browser-based ad-supported games?

Wordle seems pretty primitive by comparison to some of those, and the only competitive advantage it has, is that you can share your attempts at guessing with friends.

Also, they only have 2315 possible words as answers, so this is going to get really stale in a few months to a year.

Seems not worth paying 7 figures for, but what do I know?

The setup is successful (as evident), probably because of the fixed time schedule and only one shared global word per day. It becomes a common thing people can talk about.

We need more common reference points like that!

I just stopped playing Wordle this week since I’ve lost interest (even on Hard Mode).

Buying a fad at peak popularity is a strange business decision.

Paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/ShuaI

Or just click padlock in the chrome location bar, choose cookies, and block all cookies on the domain.

Firefox reader mode also works. (It doesn't work on all their articles or in all circumstances.)

It feels like an insane amount of money for something that I cannot imagine anyone talking about in a few weeks.

My understanding is also that this is not a particularly new game, that there are other games just like it that have come and gone. If that is the case than all NYT is really buying is the name, which, admittedly, is pretty good.

Guy gets a million from some hobby game never has to work again, I'm here grinding the 9-5 like an absolute idiot

when you google Wordle, google header is animated in Wordle style.. I don't even know what this wordle is.

My mom loves Scrabble and Boggle and it's been really great sharing Wordle results with her everyday.

Felt like we hadn't had a real societal phenomenon since Tiger King. It might just be a flash in the pan and gone in a couple months, but it's been the most wholesome one since Pokemon Go.

TIL that Wordle is actually named after its creator. Can't blame him for cashing out at the peak.

Everyone posting #Wordle scores this week will receive 10 instead of 5 free NYT articles for the next three months.

Paid NYT subscription will entitle you to a daily email (at midnight your time) with daily Wordle answer and a recommended random sequence to post on social.

I foresee this triggering an influx of kitschy word games trying to attain similar exits.

I present, Flappy Words!

Oh man, another great game eaten by the big guys. Alternative - https://wordlle.app

Anyone here care to speculate on the reason why we are seeing so many acquisitions in the game space?

There doesn't seem to be any reason you'd acquire Wordle in the first place. It's trivial to recreate it.

I assume that they're buying the brand, not the product.

Yeah, I'm fairly confident they'll just reimplement it in their own app, as the code is trivial and honestly porting it would be harder.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone at NYT already built it and has it feature flagged off or something.

Well, I'm not as upset about this as I was about the Microsoft/Actiblizzard merger, but I just can't wait for those "You've used 3 of your 5 free wordles for the month" modal popups to show up!

I wonder what % of NYT app users do the daily crossword. I would imagine its a very significant percentage, which likely is why NYT is interested in acquiring and integrating a new word game into their app experience.

NYT crossword has a different subscription than NYT news. I suspect increasing the number of news subs who also have a crossword sub is a major part of this acquisition. They'll start showing "play wordle on our crossword app" ads on the main app.

I think this is excellent purchase by NY Times and really good outcome for dev, so for both I congratulate and wish them the best. Wordle will find a good home in NYT and dev gets to enjoy money as well as fame.

Does this mean Wordle was a free to play game? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglerfish

I imagine they'll probably let people play for free but try to monetize by holding back your score history if you're not logged in. Any other ideas on how they might feature gate this?

https://wordlegame.org/ <-- exists

I actually thought this was the "real" wordle for about a week.

Ah so this is how they will get subscriptions.. dastardly plan!

I don't quite understand why the NYT didn't just create its own version of the game? Are the users so valuable? Is the game copyrighted? Is that a thing?

Everybody is now talking about NYT buying Wordle. Not that they would care about the cost as such, but they already seem to have recouped it, in my opinion.

Ready for the NYT_First_Said to NYT_Wordle clue pipeline

Beautiful lesson in just building something cool that people will love, and completely forget about monetization. If it explodes, the money will come.

But the problem for me is that it seems he didn't invent it. Five years ago this guy built this exact game, also called Wordle: https://twitter.com/StevenCravotta/status/148131879916073370...

He reached out to Josh Wardle to donate the profit he was suddenly making to charity etc. It took some time but eventually Josh responded.

Now that Josh has sold his copycat game I wonder if he's going to share the income?

Steven's app in that tweet is completely different [0], the reason he reached out to Josh wasn't because it was the same app, it was because he was unintentionally getting the traffic that should've been going to Josh just due to a name clash and didn't want to profit off of accidentally "deceiving" users.

[0] - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/wordle/id1095569891

Did you read your link? Your summary is incomprehensibly misleading.

Good for him, too bad for me, will not play it again.

It's a standalone js app and all the future words are in it. You can get a word for any date by setting your system clock to that date.

Yes, but there's little joy in doing that.

Until now, but sticking it to NYTimes might create some joy.

How does cheating yourself out of fun 'stick it' to anyone but yourself?

Not everyone finds the same things to be fun. Shocking, but true.

I'm guessing they'll jumble that around a bit and hide future answers when they integrate it into their app.

Was there a way for NYT to make an exact copy of this game and just leverage their existing users and traffic to build a player base?

They're not just buying the game. It's trivial to make. They're buying the social network that comes with it.

I haven't really been following the Wordle story until recently.

Has there been an in-depth breakdown yet of how it became so popular?

I think three parts to its popularity: 1) sharable, 2) streaks, 3) free.

1) I think this is the main reason why the game spread so rapidly. You get a neat little emoji grid every day that you can immediately compare against friends and strangers.

2) Only being able to play one word per day (quick to learn, long time to master) is really good at retaining a daily active user-base.

3) There are no ads, and most importantly, no account creation required. You just visit the webpage on the same device you first did and all the stats are in `localStorage`. NYT is notorious for not being able to do anything without an account so I don't think as many users will follow as they hope.

A few other bits. It's easy to learn, the daily format is habit-building, and luck. Lots of luck.

Luck, absolutely! I got a 3/6 based on one yellow letter and it made my day!

Adversarial Wordle is great. More difficult than Wordle but same old game. Evil Wordle is another one worth looking at.

I made clone for math, the UX is inspired by Wordle. Can NYT threat any legal action against the (free or paid) clones?

No, they don't own the concept. They own their specific implementation, and the name Wordle. (So you can't name it "MathWordle" for instance)

Or, they could always threat. But only way they'd win is if it's a straight clone (graphics and all), and/or uses the Wordle name to piggyback on that.

Just see how many match-three games there are. The concept anyone can use, don't name your game candy crush and you're fine.

I just realized the guy who made this is the guy who worked at Reddit and made “the button” and other stuff.

So happy for him!

Might be a great buy for NYT, their crossword was historically a large driver of their newspaper sales.

I love it - have cracked the code so I get the word within 3 attempts. All about the vowels.

How lonng before the game is added to their subscription model (along with the Crossword)?

Is there any IP attached to wordle?

What was preventing them from paying someone to build a clone?

Backlash. https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/creator...

> A developer who created a copycat iOS version of Wordle admitted that he was "wrong" to try to monetize the daily word game after he generated backlash online and Apple removed the clone from its App Store.

Kinda wild since it's just a javascript ripoff and slight mod of Word Mastermind, which was itself based on an older but similar game.

I think these two ideas made it a success more than some old games it is built on:

1. Whole world playing against each other trying to guess same word every day

2. Easy way to share your results without spoiling the game

3. An excellent design that lets you play without getting in the way

I wonder, now that the original Wordle is owned by a mega-corp, would people feel the same if other clones appeared?

Wordle is the IP.

You mean the name? I guess that makes sense.

If the NYT would release "The daily NYW word game" it would probably not catch on as much.

It's insane that they purchased it - the game itself is a rip-off of a UK gameshow from the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(British_game_show)

Think of the payoff for the engineer per hour of work.

Truly insane and impressive. Kudos!

Man, what is this - International Buy A Game Company Month?

Smart purchase by NYT.

I can't read this link, but presumably this is the same content without the paywall? https://www.nytco.com/press/wordle-new-york-times-games/

I don't know what it is but the hype around Wordle has actually made me not want to give it a try. Is there a word to describe someone that gets discouraged from trying things that feel "mainstream"?

The burst of its popularity is one of the reasons I choose not to try it. Right now, I would see friends posting their guesses every day, and it's getting annoying. Since it was just a text and emoji, it acted like a normal status update and I can't just "hide all from this source" (as it's not an app/page) without hiding all updates of my friends that played it.

“wet blanket” works pretty well in my experience.

Wordle tomorrow: https://twitter.com/henriquev/status/1488304923607552009 lol

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.

Link to try them yourself: https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords

Weird. Did anyone else think NYT already owned Wordle?

Heck, it would be cute to see Wordle in the paper!

Truly, nothing in the world of tech is sacred.

> At the time it moves to The New York Times, Wordle will be free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay.

"At the time" is the sticky bit.

1. There are a number of open source clones

2. If they want to spend 2M to build in features or integrate with their crossword, why shouldn’t they make something back on it?

NYT making money isn’t scary. Imagine Microsoft getting its hands on this.

But it doesn't need new features, or to integrate with their crossword.

It's like adding truffle shavings and gold flakes to a hot dog. It misses the reason people love the hot dog.

Wordle is basically the 2022 Flappy Bird. It isn't particularly fun or challenging, but there's a weird social experience behind it. That fades fast, and I would say is already fading rapidly. If he got a lucrative exit strategy, good for him (though it makes all of the moralizing around clones pretty nonsensical).

more than Flappy Bird I'd say 2048 but yes 100% agreed

Who knows, NYTimes could use it to justify the next Iraq war /s

More seriously, the creator promised to never have ads in it[1] now it's going to be in a site that has ads. Whenever a product/company is sold the creator can no longer make any promises and prior promises are null and void.

NYTimes isn't some benevolent benefactor, WORDLE could have stayed in the realm of relatively untouched private enterprises that makes people's lives a little bit better (think Craigslist) and now I can look forward to a banner ad telling me I need to subscribe to NYTimes to save democracy a couple times a year.

There are free clones, but talking to friends and random distant co-workers about todays word was fun. That won't last.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/wordle-will-s...

NYT has maintained several free to play games for years now. This game is equally trivial with several of them, for example, Spelling Bee.

https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords

I mean they bought it for 7 figures - so yes, it might be a subscription feature eventually?

Its not like they pulled an AWS and just ripped off an open source MIT licensed clone in their newspaper or something.

Note that they didn't mention advertising

Surely a free alternative would quickly eclipse any paywalled NYT version in popularity. Part of what made this game so popular is that it's so accessible... no accounts, no ads, nothing.

Great job Josh!

You've reached your limit of free...

Awesome :(

This makes perfect sense and fits in well with their games subscription offering [0]. I'll be sad to see Wordle go behind a paywall but this is great for the creator.

[0] https://www.nytco.com/press/both-cooking-and-games-reach-1-m...

"Low XXXXX figures"

I hope this ends the hype. I'm a bit annoyed seeing Wordle guesses everywhere online.

What is the NYT buying here? If they paywall it or put ads on it, anyone can easily make a Wordle clone as long as they give it a different name and don't copy the original code.

I suppose we/(I?) should get started on an independent version. There's no way the Times doesn't some how paywall or otherwise ruin this.

Here’s a free version in case the original gets paywalled:

https://wordle.nyc

Congrats! I'll keep playing until the paywall comes crashing down on my fingertips.

Well, I guess it is dead

Dordle is arguably more fun and won't be hidden behind a paywall in the near future :) https://zaratustra.itch.io/dordle

So will this post [1] replace the infamous HN Dropbox comment [2]? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916899 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

> "The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players."

(emphasis mine) Guess that means a paywall in 3...2...

What if we Come to find out his COUSIN runs the games division in NYT. Hahahaha classic story.

Whelp, it's now dead. Unusable as wirecutter, the last thing I used that they bought.

Wordle is too easy if you have a text editor and a scrabble word finder. Neither of which I would consider cheating... I think it's a fad unless they change the game up.

Baseball is too easy if the batter has a tennis racket and a motorcycle.

That comparison doesn’t hold, though. You’d ground quite short with a tennis racket because of the give in the racket (which absorbs all the momentum in the ball that you’re using), and by the time you were to get atop the motorcycle to ride to first after you hit that ground ball, you’d already be out. I bet it’d be pretty close to a bunt or break the racket, honestly. Baseballs have energy and a big part of it is utilized in the hit to add to distance. Think about the inverse: hitting a tennis ball with a bat instead of a racket.

Even with a perfectly placed hit it’s hard to imagine a motorcycle improving the run to first, too, and that gets even worse when you’re thinking about other bases. Going to first you have the momentum of your swing to help you get going too, particularly if you bat left. I’d honestly like to see that tried, because I bet a runner would win every time even if you made the rule touching with a tire instead of your body.

I’m struggling to improve on your metaphor, though, and historically cheating has focused on other things like sticky balls to improve handling. I think it’s pretty hard to hit better with a different tool than a bat, short of making the bat bigger but keeping its properties. Maybe a treated 2x4? Corked bats come to mind too as something that’s been tried, and what that does to the bat and swing is interesting, but it pretty conclusively doesn’t make you hit better or farther (the opposite; we’ve played with it on my team).

Fine. It’s easy if the batter has one of these:

https://youtu.be/Puo6Vgcbxps

And we assume that the motorcycle is already started and warmed up and the base path is paved etc. etc.

Also the batter has a gun.

Similarly I get exceptional times in marathons, when I ride my motorbike and start half way around the course.

"Given the Opportunity, Players Will Optimize The Fun Out of a Game"

Wordle is a game. Games are meant to be fun. If you want to enjoy the game, don't meta-game it. Stop using a text editor and a word finder and see why we actually still enjoy it.

It’s probably solved in ~3.4 guesses and 4 at worse - there was a proof shared recently on HN

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