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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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?)

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

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.

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

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”.

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