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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 figured they were buying the IP more than anything.