> 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.
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
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.
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...
They could have gotten Wordle recreated in less than a week. iirc NYT used to employ Rich Harris of Svelte fame so I would imagine they have the developer skills to recreate Wordle.
Are they buying a brand? How can they make money off it?
Is this a marketing/advertising play?
My guess is they've been hearing about it a ton from their crossword userbase and wanted the traffic, users, and IP.
The Times crossword is a lot of fun for a lot of people. So is Wordle.
The Times bundles these with other games in their game subscription.
Let's say a 200,000 English speakers around the world pay 5 bucks a month for it. Let's say Wordle pushes that to 250,000 due to the extra exposure. Within a year they've recouped their expenses. Everyone wins.
I think you are off by two orders of magnitude, at least.
The entire pandemic has been full of these flash-in-a-pan shared experiences.
I don't get this purchase either.
I mean, I do think games come and go, but I think Wordle is some really solid design. It's paced and measured and feel like a mature experience, even though it's new.
NYT could absolutely clone the gameplay - it would be easy - but I think they would rightly be hounded by people attacking them for stealing the game. Instead, they settle on a reasonable (but low) purchase price that probably includes some consulting on how to expand the game, get the blessing of the original creator, and have a feel-good story about adopting and expanding a game people like.
Like, this is a good fit for the NYT "word game collection" brand, but because of the popularity they have to be careful about how they integrate it. I'm sure they paid a bit more than they wanted to, but not actually too much more than it would take to develop a clone, and what they really pay for is protecting against bad press. Seems fine to me.
To be fair, I think most averagely skilled developers could copy Wordle within a very short time. I am very much reminded of the game 2048 though. While it definitely was a fad too, it still has a huge base of players even now. So maybe the NY Times sees some potential there.
Ding ding ding!
The term wordle is very recognizable and a great way to introduce people to the nytimes games collection, which other than the crossword aren't well known
1) embed a link to times puzzles into the boilerplate "share" feature. 2) embed enticing pictures of other puzzles that the NYT owns in the actual game page itself. 3) embed links to wordle from existing puzzles, with the hope of preventing people from clicking away from the times collection of puzzles.
Seems like a steep price for all of this though.
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?
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
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.
"At the time" is the sticky bit.
2. If they want to spend 2M to build in features or integrate with their crossword, why shouldn’t they make something back on it?
NYT making money isn’t scary. Imagine Microsoft getting its hands on this.
Its not like they pulled an AWS and just ripped off an open source MIT licensed clone in their newspaper or something.
Pretty fun. If you read his homepage https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/ he mentions he created Reddit's "The Button" and "Place" April Fools games. Dude's pretty creative.
I look forward to continue playing until it gets moved to NYT, and then dropping off as soon as they put up a signin gate.
Let NYT figure out how to monetize a simple easily copied game like this. I don't envy the team who is responsible for making this deal profitable for them.
This deal makes perfect sense for NYT. I don't see it making sense for a lot of other companies (they don't already have an engine that you can stick games into and get subscriber dollars out of, and building that engine will swamp the cost of Wordle itself), but here, sure.
NY Times is also part of AMEX's digital entertainment credit, so subscribers print revenue that AMEX reimburses them behind the scenes. NY Times gets to print high revenue numbers anyway, and the public markets trade that a multiple. So NY Times has access to capital to occasionally make a 7 figure purchase. Media properties struggle to find something for a growth strategy but they have access to capital, they just don't expect to continue to have access to capital which makes them have to cut things earlier, expecting gloom and doom.
That's my feeling too - it's quick and cheerful. You know you can fire it up and be done ~5 minutes later with a nice little thing to post onto $SOCIALOFCHOICE and no need to think about it again for 24 hours.
Don't give up the day job, buy a chunk of real estate and 'level up' in one go based on a happy accident, this is found money. And if you think it is worth 10's of millions then you probably should have made a deal with the author yourself, easy money, right?
Better a deal at a lower than optimal valuation than no deal at the best possible price.
This thing may go down as fast as it went up, better to capitalize on it while it's hot.
Getting the 7-figure money presumably upfront AND also the freedom to move on to something that isn't "try to monetize Wordle", sounds like an incredible deal.
If it's taxed like regular income, at $2.5M, ~$925,000 goes to Federal taxes, $200,000 to NY State.
However, the game itself is exactly the same as 'Lingo' - an old US show that still has a UK version airing right now. It has also had its own app for a while.
It's amazing how a couple of extra touches can make something explode in popularity.
If it had a single barrier (install an app, create an account, click through ads, etc), it would have been yet another of countless word games. It was a brilliant confluence for a momentary explosion in popularity.
All along, though, people were yipping about the grand benevolence and moral supremacy of this version versus clones (when the app itself was, as you mentioned, not that derived from an existing game, even aping the coloring), and that all looks pretty silly now that the creator quite rightly managed a pretty lucrative "exit" for a trivial work. And I applaud them for it, and respect the brilliant choices made to get there.
Did I read that right ? Wordle was valued above 1M. It seems crazy from the outside but I guess I never realized how popular it.
I'm notoriously bad at picking up habits too, even if it's something I want to do.
It's the new sudoku. It's the new crossword puzzle.
The technologist in me suggests he’s right.
I know it’ll remain like it was for some time but eventually be monetized.
Looks like he found a pretty solid monetization strategy.
Not sayings its a bad game--its a great idea--just don't see what the value is in buying it. I'm not even sure what exactly they bought, it doesn't really have any monetization/userbase/IP.
He reached out to Josh Wardle to donate the profit he was suddenly making to charity etc. It took some time but eventually Josh responded.
Now that Josh has sold his copycat game I wonder if he's going to share the income?
What was preventing them from paying someone to build a clone?
> A developer who created a copycat iOS version of Wordle admitted that he was "wrong" to try to monetize the daily word game after he generated backlash online and Apple removed the clone from its App Store.
Well played.
Wardle, explaining the reasons behind his decision not to monetize Wordle, asked, “Why can’t something just be fun on the internet?”
“I’m fortunate enough. I’m in a position where I’m comfortable. I don’t have to charge people money for this. I don’t begrudge people if they’re making things and charging money for them online. That’s fine. But with Wordle, that was never the goal,” Wardle said. “And I would, ideally, like to keep it that way.”»
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/27/wordle-the-global-phe...
https://reichel.dev/blog/reverse-engineering-wordle.html#loo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga...
Remember another fad: HQ Trivia [3]?
I honestly don't even know what Wordle is. No shade on anyone who enjoys it. I just don't think anyone will be talking about it in 6 months.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/03/21/zynga-acq...
[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/04/zynga-shuts-down-omgpop-on...
You're probably right about it being a temporary fad.
Can I just host a wordle clone and bot add the NYT's latest word every day at midnight from Twitter? Can you copyright "the english dictionary word that was used on Wordle NYT today"?
I feel like the owner basically is laughing to the bank on this, they've bought.. a domain? The brand "wordle"? Even that?
Wordle seems pretty primitive by comparison to some of those, and the only competitive advantage it has, is that you can share your attempts at guessing with friends.
Also, they only have 2315 possible words as answers, so this is going to get really stale in a few months to a year.
Seems not worth paying 7 figures for, but what do I know?
We need more common reference points like that!
Anyone here care to speculate on the reason why we are seeing so many acquisitions in the game space?
Has there been an in-depth breakdown yet of how it became so popular?
1) I think this is the main reason why the game spread so rapidly. You get a neat little emoji grid every day that you can immediately compare against friends and strangers.
2) Only being able to play one word per day (quick to learn, long time to master) is really good at retaining a daily active user-base.
3) There are no ads, and most importantly, no account creation required. You just visit the webpage on the same device you first did and all the stats are in `localStorage`. NYT is notorious for not being able to do anything without an account so I don't think as many users will follow as they hope.
Or, they could always threat. But only way they'd win is if it's a straight clone (graphics and all), and/or uses the Wordle name to piggyback on that.
Just see how many match-three games there are. The concept anyone can use, don't name your game candy crush and you're fine.
Congrats to the creator, I would've done the same.
[1]: https://venturebeat.com/2011/07/05/zynga-paid-53-3m-to-buy-w...
> The Wordle URL moves to https://newyorktimes.com/wordle. That is all.
How I hope the New York Times monetizes Wordle:
> The Wordle URL moves to https://newyorktimes.com/wordle, and they add a small NY Times logo to the Share page. Clicking it takes you to the newspaper's front page. That is all.
"On March 21, 2012, Draw Something was bought by the gaming company Zynga for $180 million. The game's popularity peaked on the day of the sale, and the number of daily active users tumbled from 15 million to 10 million by early May."
I'm over Worlde, personally. I started when it first showed up on hn a few weeks ago and stopped recently. It was fun, it was a little daily thing. but it's an easy game and I've moved on
Buying a fad at peak popularity is a strange business decision.
My understanding is also that this is not a particularly new game, that there are other games just like it that have come and gone. If that is the case than all NYT is really buying is the name, which, admittedly, is pretty good.
Felt like we hadn't had a real societal phenomenon since Tiger King. It might just be a flash in the pan and gone in a couple months, but it's been the most wholesome one since Pokemon Go.
Paid NYT subscription will entitle you to a daily email (at midnight your time) with daily Wordle answer and a recommended random sequence to post on social.
I actually thought this was the "real" wordle for about a week.
So happy for him!
Truly insane and impressive. Kudos!
Smart purchase by NYT.
Link to try them yourself: https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords
Awesome :(
[0] https://www.nytco.com/press/both-cooking-and-games-reach-1-m...
(emphasis mine) Guess that means a paywall in 3...2...
