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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

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endisneigh

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?

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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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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