> 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.
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.
Not for much longer. NYT has to recoup that investment somehow.
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.
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.
This is better PR than a media goliath ripping off the success of the little guy.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wordlegame/comments/rxeg1f/you_can_...
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.
And BTW I'm using Chrome with uBlock Origin enabled here.
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.
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.
And for the NYT, a company that made a $55M profit last quarter, it's probably a good bet.
Could see there being a daily free Wordle and then a paid app with a few more variants/archives.
I do. And I'd be surprised if I'm the only one.
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.
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.
This is HN, do you really want to know how that question would be answered?
Isn't that exactly how tiktok was born?
Weird breakdown choice, again with the infantilizing of millennials. All millenials are adults
It's funny how it spreads... the ease of sharing results is what I think has really driven the popularity.
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.
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.
Any subsequent value usage must be repurchased. No trading of vowels.
yet.
Why?
There is objectively nothing that NYT could add to the game to make it more interesting. It can only make it worse.
The original creator was not able to do that due to infrastructure limitations, but surely NYT would have the proper setup to handle that.
The game is perfect as is, and I’m sad that it will now be used to make money.
All because someone coukd read the source to cheat and wouldn't, idk, just copy paste the squares about in their tweets?
I feel stupid.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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'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...
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.
The game is viral because of the way people share their results on social media. This is a huge network effect.
Isn't the dev team one guy? I don't think they are hiring him.
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.
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).
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.
I don't believe this, but I'm happy to be proven wrong!
I'm guessing you saw a guy bang together one or two simple screens in english and skip a bunch of details
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.
Developer time would cost $10K.
Customer base... who like wordle because it's a simple, clean, free, not NYT.
The app is very very small part of Uber or AirBnb business
(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?)
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.
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
Well that certainly doesn't help for virality.
Wonder if anyone else plays it anymore.
I would've for sure taken the first good offer for my project in that case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The "wordle" brand alone is easily worth $1m
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.
But it's essentially Hangman, isn't it? With, actually, a worse user interface.
(Oh, and the code and doco, on the off chance that re using it was easier than re implementing it in my web property.)
Am I out of my mind? Isn't wordle just a faddy little mobile game?
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.
This feels kinda like the flappy bird craze, albeit a little less silly...
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.
> 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...
https://bafybeic4blel5vf4il73n3nzt6vw7npsov6or3cp3myjms4npii...