“I do get why they did this. It’s sucks, but I get why.”
Please, do tell.
Please, do tell.
Because they want to make as much money as possible off their acquisition. If someone else is housing a history of the game, and people can go play the game there instead of on NYT, that's a net bad for them. There's no NYT ads or 3rd party tracking pixels on the archive, so it's tapping into their market.
If I gave a fuck about guessing a 5 letter word each day, I personally would prefer to do it in a way that doesn't continue to support the Gray Lady, so I'm going to do it on the Archive instead of the NYT page.
I'd guess they want to quash competitors, and also face pressure from Legal to defend the "Wordle" name.
I'm not in the mood to get into the semantics of "How the NYT is using Wordle to make money" but I think a good faith read of my comment and yours would say we're agreeing: They're doing it to protect an investment that they assume will make them money in the long run.