On Wordle, the NYT, and Antitrust | Hacker News Reader

On Wordle, the NYT, and Antitrust

semiotech.substack.com

Casting Wordle as a NYT competitor squashed by acquisition is pretty stupid.

Wordle hadn't even been turned into an on-going business, and Wardle apparently had no interest in doing so. There wasn't even a squint-and-imagine-the-future potential competitor here, even just considering NYTs game business.

Yes, at some point you're going to have to pay for Wordle, through a subscription and/or viewing ads or make do with a crappy knockoff. Like everything else. This isn't anyone's first day on the internet, is it? If so, sorry to break it to you.

I think that's part of the author's point. These acquisitions happen early enough that it's not clear whether or not Instagram, Wordle, etc. would be competitive businesses.

However, I don't want to work in a regulatory environment that says I can't sell my small business to some larger company on the off chance it might some day be significant on its own.

Perhaps there is a company size which is just too big to make acquisitions because the risk of stifling competition is too great. Or make any purchases of companies in markets that don't have enough competition.

By the way, the NYT is big, but not that big… ~$2B yearly revenue.

What is the size of a company? Net income? Market cap? Number of employees?

It's almost certainly not about the absolute size of the company, but its relative position in whatever niche(s) it operates in.

Yeah that’s the author’s argument. That’s why I called it stupid.

The idea of forestalling competition by buying non-competitors doesn’t make any sense at all. NYT would have to buy all kinds of things, spending orders of magnitudes more money than they have.

I have a non-business game… is there any question why the NYT isn’t offerings me low-seven figures for it?

Also, NYTimes could have cloned Wordle without paying Wardle, and that probably would have been worse for everyone involved.

Instagram had raised nearly $60mm* and had 13 employees when it was sold. Wordle was a single person, part-time. They are not remotely similar for the purposes of antitrust discussion.

*Do people still know that this is a lot of money, and that most companies are not able to raise this much capital?

The creator didn't want to monetise it themselves, and wasn't really intended as a global phenomenon so this seems like a great option for them.

Also I wouldn't be shocked if NYT keep it free. They have some free word games, and encourage you to sign up for the rest of them - having a huge audience that come and play word games every single day seems like a great opportunity for upselling.

edit - a quick search suggests it's millions of people per day. At £25/year for a subscription, you'd probably not need a huge conversion rate for it to pay off quickly.

I'm not super happy NYT bought Wordle but I wouldn't go so far as saying that Wordle might "threaten the NYT crossword puzzle", I don't think something like Wordle requires the kind of highly visible editing the NYT crossword does.

I think they just saw a good opportunity to get a bunch of new subscribers. Which is kind of weird because Wordle is super easy to reproduce, evidently.

I think the NYT just wanted the name. They could build a clone if they wanted.

Paying the creator was also the classy thing to do. Spending "low seven figures" is not a big deal for the NYT financially, but it's a significant token of goodwill (well, to everyone other than the author of this article).

I prefer Kottke's take:

https://kottke.org/22/02/wordle-sold-to-the-ny-times-and-tha...

Quoted in that article:

> Creator of Wordle: I can’t keep running this thing; I love the NYT puzzle peeps, they inspired me to make this thing you love, so I sold it to them! Twitter: How dare you give this thing we love a sustaining home!

> Honestly, people. The choice isn’t between Wordle as it exists today and NYT Wordle. It is between no Wordle and NYT Wordle, or even worse, a much crummier acquirer.

Absolute horseshit. Wordle requires nothing more than static hosting for a single small page. Maintenance costs (and effort) are literally zero.

You cut the quote too early and fully changed the author's meaning.

The author isn't talking about the financial costs of running the site. As you noted, those are near zero.

The "cost" referred to is the emotional/psychological one of suddenly being responsible for something that millions of people feel very passionate about. That's a non-zero cost for many people, and not a cost that everyone may want to take on.

(To avoid confusion, I edited my comment to add "(and effort)" just before the reply above was posted.)

The article goes on to say it "costs Wardle a few bucks a day to host", which is an overestimate possibly by a factor of infinity, depending how he's hosting it.

As for the effort, there is none. Part of the genius of wordle is that it is zero maintenance.*

And as for the "psychological burden" do you have any evidence besides a statement made after the nyt paid him over a million dollars for it that there was any such burden? This guy has invented massively popular things before: The Button and The Place at Reddit.

For that matter, any evidence that the statement wasn't simply written by the NYT for him and a condition of his offer? In it he says it's important to him that "... as Wordle grows, it continues to provide a great experience to everyone" - that just doesn't ring true. He never showed any intention of expanding it functionally, and its expansion in terms of user base requires no action at all from him as there is no infrastructure to scale. And he knows this, of course, having developed it.

Finally, even if somehow in the absence of any maintenance effort the "psychological burden" of owning it was too much it didn't need a 7 figure knight in shining armour to save him from it. People are running clones everywhere. Any number of people would have gladly taken it off his hands.

* This is easy to verify. You can just save the page to disk, point any webserver at it and it works perfectly. No DB, no server-side logic or state of any kind.

Given the thing of value is the amount of people hitting the website, you'd want to leverage that to promote whatever you want to promote, locking it behind a paywall would instantly kill the visitors and more than likely everyone would just scatter and go find a clone (or move on to something else)

They're not paying for wordle, the game - obviously that's been cloned a million times over (and it's a clone itself).

They're paying for the viral social network around Wordle.

My family has a group chat where we brag about our Wordle results and discuss our strategies every single day. It's a nice way to connect with my adult siblings. I can only imagine how many other groups like ours exist.

Wouldn't the NYT like to capture that kind of energy within their Games offering, within all their offerings?

It will take finesse for the NYT to land that energy as a profit-making service that drives growth, but that's a challenge they've got to take on, and if anyone in the news industry can do it, it's them.

Great investment at a fire-sale price. Viral concepts like this are 1 in a million.

Can you link the original that wordle cloned?

I can't find the article I first read about this in but the Wordle wikipedia page mentions a couple of antecedents with near-identical gameplay, including a TV game show called Lingo ...

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

Many lament the downfall of traditional media then crucify them when they creatively explore new opportunities for themselves.

Should the "Gray Lady" have just stubbornly continued to print its papers until it was bought up by the same PE vipers who have destroyed countless other newspaper companies?

I applaud them for establishing other opportunities for themselves to survive and thrive. IMHO, the NY Times is not the enemy here.

> As a society, we want to properly incent smart people to build useful things.

The author of the piece needs to help bridge us from his proposal to "re-examine the way we make rules around tech M&A", and how Mr. Wardle would have been compensated for his work.

I don't blame him in the slightest for taking the money - I would have too - but Mr. Wardle didn't need to be compensated for his "work". He wrote it as a (beautifully crafted) bit of fun, with no desire for or expectation of payment. You couldn't wish for a clearer demonstration of the fallacy of assuming nobody will create anything unless they're "incentivised" to do so.

It wasn't work, it was play.

He wrote it for one person. He didn’t ask to be the focus of millions of people’s attention. Even if that attention is mostly positive that is a lot to deal with just in the sheer volume of messages, let alone the possibility of unhinged people thinking he wants to marry them or that he’s sending them coded messages in Wordle or whatever.

Even if it's simple to host with that much traffic it's bound to be a headache. Forget to renew your SSL certificate and the site is inaccessible for 5 minutes? Great, now you've got 10,000 angry emails in your inbox.

I don’t blame him for wanting to get out of the spotlight and let someone else take the responsibility. Creating it may have been play, but keeping it going and dealing with the expectations of a huge fanbase is definitely work.

As I said I don't blame him in the slightest for selling it. Did I give the impression I did?

I'm counteracting two claims I see repeated a lot on this:

1. That he wouldn't have written it without the expectation of being paid. He did in fact do so, so that's obviously nonsense.

2. That without the NYT buying it it wouldn't have survived. It would, even if the original dev no longer wanted to be involved. Any number of people would gladly host it.

I'm just counteracting the implication that running a website with millions of daily users is a simple and easy thing that someone would be happy to do for fun. I don't think that's the case. Creating a game is fun. Dealing with millions of people is not fun.

People are missing the point - NYT paid to have THE wordle of the day - talking to other people about your specific battle with that day's word was 99 percent of the fun.

The act of whipping up a quick clone, while a a balm to the ego and a fun exercise for junior devs, does not recreate the social phenomenon.

I note that all future Wordle words are already known, so it would be trivial to make a "compatible" Wordle.

Trivial and, presumably, illegal.

How could it possibly be illegal? There is no IP protection for Date % words.length

That's what I'd expect, copyright on the word list. However, IANAL and I would love to see some proper analysis on the legal status of clones, especially identical ones with the same word list.

You can have a perfect clone of wordle running in a couple of minutes, but I'm certain that would be copyright infringement.

There is a copyright on databases for exactly that reason.

Exactly. They paid a million bucks for the free marketing and built in audience. They're buying the audience.

The NYT's main competitors aren't other newspapers. Their competitors are Substack, Candy Crush, and Netflix.

As Byrne Hobart points out,

> "in their latest quarter almost 30% of their new digital subscriptions were for games, cooking, and Wirecutter, rather than news."

And a bit more cheekily:

> "When there's a negative New York Times article about a startup, one of the not-uncommon Tech Twitter jokes is that this constitutes bullying from an established, profitable unicorn with over $1bn in annual recurring revenue."

https://www.thediff.co/p/the-nyt-dead-trees-and-disruption (paywall)

It still blows my mind that you have to pay for Wirecutter nowadays. They ultimately end their articles with an affiliate link to their recommendation. I guess perhaps requiring a paid subscription quells any question of incentives, as in they're in it for the subscription money rather than the affiliate links. Still, it's odd, you could say the same thing about Consumer Reports but for some reason, I don't equate them in my mind - maybe it's because of how Wirecutter came up and the fact they have a deals page. Ultimately though it doesn't matter. I'll never subscribe to any NYT service again until they make it easy to cancel. Talk about dark pattern... yeesh.

Wirecutter has a pretty generous paywall -- I think 10 articles.

Nothing different than Flappy Bird honestly. Cash out on minimum effort and everyone will forget eventually.

The worst case of this I’ve seen was the iOS game Threes. Cool and original idea (to me) on a puzzle game. Even had an art style that was carefully crafted and audio lines from the game devs friends. It started gaining steam among puzzle fans. I think it cost 3-4€ as a one time purchase in the app store.

What happened next?

Someone released a free version called 2048 that ripped off the idea, made the number 3 based puzzle use the number 2, made the game less challenging and might have even made it use ads at the bottom of the screen.

Because Wordle was already free there wasn’t a chance for this kind of douchebag move. NYT as an established brand would face criticism if they cloned the game based on its current popularity (the idea for worlde apparently is not original).

NYT did this by the book in my opinion. I think the writer ks just connecting the two for easy points.

Meanwhile, Microsoft buys up all of Activision-Blizzard and Sony buys Bungie and no one blinks an eye. No one even noticed that Zynga just got bought by Take-Two within the past month!

Definitely thought it was ironic the NYT bought a “competitor” after constantly complaining about big tech doing it over the years.

not to mention their dual class stock structure.

They never get called out on it because the overwhelmingly liberal media all read it (don't downvote me, you know this to be unequivocally true). It's as simple as that. Everything has fucking turned political.

What additional insight is created by beating this strawman "liberal", beyond just straightforwardly saying that the media is biased towards its own entrenched power which is intrinsically true and relevant to the topic at hand?

> Definitely thought it was ironic the NYT bought a “competitor” after constantly complaining about big tech doing it over the years.

You shouldn't conflate the New York Times Company with the people who write articles for the New York Times (or even its editorial board). They're not the same entity. Apologies if somehow that's not actually what you're doing, but my experience is when someone talks about the "NYT complaining" they're pretty much always talking about a general impression of its opinion pages.

Social media gets constantly criticized for views expressed by individuals on their platforms (often by NYT or other media!). Why shouldn't we be able to do the same to traditional media companies?

They didn't say you can't criticize. They explained why it wouldn't be ironic even if the comparison made sense. Editorial independence is expected.

Don't complain about what others do, when thats how you get paid. Get your house in order first.

> Don't complain about what others do, when thats how you get paid. Get your house in order first.

Are you saying the people who write articles for the New York Times should muzzle themselves in many topic areas, so as to not be seen as being critical of anything the corporation they work may do?

The NYT Crossword isn't dominant in its industry, unless you define their industry to be ridiculously small. I'd say their industry is video games, or maybe just puzzle video games.

For instance, this article, https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/400000-people-now-subscribe..., says that they had 400,000 digital subscribers in 2019. That's at most $33M/year, plus they also get some ad revenue. But Candy Crush Saga made $1.2B in 2021.

The NYT Crossword is also available in the newspaper and books, but this probably doesn't earn that much more than the electronic version.

I always remember that article where people said the new companies and ideas wouldn’t come from garages anymore. Looks like a single HTML game is a huge success now

I agree with the spirit of this piece, but I think Wordle is a weird choice to try to highlight the point. I enjoy Wordle, but I'm certainly not going to die without it. Not to downplay Wardle, but, as xeromal pointed out, it's pretty easy to crank out a clone. Lots of people already have. If NYT paywalls it, I'll either stop playing or find or create a clone.

wordle is a game that can be cloned in 20 minutes, and frequently is

worrying about that as an anti-trust issue is beyond the pale

No, NYT bought the NFT of Wordle

Joke's on the NYT: anybody can put up a Wordle work-alike. And will, the moment NYT puts it behind a paywall.

You think the NYT spent seven figures without knowing this? they’re paying for the name

There are lots of places to play sudoku and crosswords for free too. Yet people are happy to pay the NYT for those games. Why wouldn't the same be true of this game?

Sudoku is pretty generic, but crosswords have an element of authorship that is important. Writing a good crossword puzzle takes talent and skill and the people making crosswords for the NY Times are going to be better than most people probably.

There are lots of copies already

Wordle is the copy. It's Lingo.

I bet the Wordle author is wiping his tears with hundred dollar bills over the viciousnous of capitalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com