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.
> NYT essentially just bought the hottest new social network.
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.
No ads, no pay to play, no upgrades, no sign in, no social graph, takes 2 minutes per day, everyone plays the same/one puzzle per day, unwritten rules you don't ruin it for others, etc etc. The perks are great, I hope the NYT doesn't change it. I could take an ad, but changes to anything else might make me stop playing.
Plus, the "share" mechanism is obviously not an invasion of privacy or a tracking beacon. It just puts a cute unicode game board in your clipboard, as far as I can see.
Yeah they're just unicode emojis really simple to do and a big part of the popularity imo. From discord, twitter or whatsapp I can easily share and compare with a bunch of different groups of friends.
So the fun word game stops working while commuting by train because it needs to stop me "cheating" in a purely fun /social game by phoning home during the time I have to play it, where the connection is spotty at best, and the quick game loop of guess, read result, think gets janked because of railway cuttings and tunnels?
All because someone coukd read the source to cheat and wouldn't, idk, just copy paste the squares about in their tweets?
Exactly. It's somewhat baffling to me how some people focus so much on the technology aspects of something to the point of forgetting that its success is due to the things that it does not do.
For context, a Twitter bot was recently banned for automatically replying to Wordle tweets and spoiling the next day's word. Preventing that would improve the gameplay experience by defending against malicious disruption.
Not really. The bot can get its data from when NZ hits midnight, hours and hours before America and Europe etc. Even if it was always released at the exact same time globally, nothing to stop a bot solving it / fetching it immediately and replying to users posts from yesterday about what todays one is.
I don't see a point of this. I could probably find the correct word for today by Googling so server/client side does not make any difference if we all share the same word for the day which is I think the major feature behind the success.
> You can feel any way you want about NYT, but you’d argue that “multiple word length” options wouldn’t make the game better for some? Or hybridizing it with the crossword?
Anything that takes away from everyone getting the same word on the same day will absolutely nuke its popularity. There's really nothing novel about the game to make it popular other than that. Don't get me wrong, it's fun and well implemented, but the concept existed before Wordle. What makes Wordle successful is how dirt-simple it is to share your results on any medium.
There is/was a Dutch TV show called Lingo that is based on the same game and I'd expect there to be more such shows.
Only variations the TV show has is the 6 word version on Saturday and some comedians made a sketch with a 19 letter version: words like "Marshallplanachtige" [0]
EDIT: of course there's also this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7qxpAUKy4c in which some dude tries to not say a word he probably saw in a porno but does have to say it of course so mispronounces.
Not really true as it is, being based on local time. For example, there's only a one hour period each day where someone in New Zealand and someone in Hawaii have the same word.
Fortunatly Wordle clearly signals it with a countdown timer, instead of leaving it up to the reader to figure out what "day" they mean like other daily puzzle sites or people on the internet in general.
I would never have found the game (and played it) without those results being shared. Anecdata, sure, and correlation != causation an all that, but I have to agree.
Have you considered your impulse to make everything bigger, better, more efficient, more configurable, more profitable, etc is actually the “small minded” one in this day and age?
What else is there? People don't enjoy the game because of logic and reason, they enjoy it because of emotion: it's fun, you get a feeling of accomplishment when you win, when you lose, you feel driven to do better tomorrow, etc.
It's all very very simple, and that's what's great about it.
Please stop with the "that's anti-hacker" rhetoric. That's the kind of talk designed to shut down discussion. I think it's only natural to be cynical of a big corporation like NYT buying up a small one-person creation. Wordle is great as it is. Maybe there are ways to improve it, but I doubt NYT can do anything the original developer can do, at least not without completely changing the game into something it's not.
>There is objectively nothing that NYT could add to the game to make it more interesting. It can only make it worse.
What discussion did THAT open?
EDIT: And I'm glad you're expressing opinions! That's the point of discourse. GP was doing something different and just because you agree with GP's opinion doesn't mean that his rhetorical choices are sound!
Fair, an absolutist statement like that is pretty silly and obviously false. And whether any particular change makes a game better or worse is inherently subjective; "objectively nothing" is false by definition.
There are already a gazillion variations of the game out there. Any kid can take the core idea and make an open source version with all these configurations. Actually it has already been done, just look for the "evil wordle" version that was some "show HN".
My point is that, while is nice for the original creator that he could find someone to give that much money for the game, this valuation is only based on how much rent the NYT might be able to extract from it, not from the value of the creation itself. And that tells me that as an user I have nothing to benefit from this acquisition.
> But what’s your evidence for “NYT is into seeking rent”?
Aside from the eyeballs, please tell me what value is there in the wordle property to justify buying it for millions of dollars?
If the game itself was using interesting closed technology or had any other kind of intellectual property attached to it, then maybe it could be justified. But nobody spends that amount of money if they are not looking for ways to make it back manifold.
If the product already has millions of users who need no training or coaching to get using it, the "Good UX" is already there.
> Are you implying that NYT should have just copied it, rather than rewarding the creator?
I am not implying anything. I am stating that the only thing that the NYT (or anyone else really) would be interested in buying from wordle is the user base, they made an investment and they will look for ways to get their money back.
Everything else is easy to replicate. It's hard to think of a way where they can get their money back that doesn't destroy or puts a limit on the things that make it so appealing to people.
If you think that any corporation has any interest of giving away millions of dollars to someone as "reward", I have a bridge to sell you.
They do so much stupid stuff in the crossword (REBUS, missing letters, un-ordered phrases) that they can make a mess of anything. I HOPE they'll keep it as it is but just charge for past Wordles. That's the only improvement they could make.
They do so much stupid stuff in the crossword (REBUS, missing letters, un-ordered phrases)
Those are the meta game puzzles which generally happen on Wed or Thu. They can be frustrating, but the “aha!” moment, when you discover what’s going on, is the point. Those puzzles are the ones that set NYT crosswords as the gold standard and show off the creativity of the puzzle makers. Of course YMMV.
If you think "multiple word length" would enhance the game, you haven't thought for very long about what makes the game work. It basically has to be 5 letters or the entire structure falls apart.
As for Craigslist, I suspect there's not "a reason". I imagine it's a lot of different, complex reasons.
While I'm not absolute on the notion that 5 letters is perfect, I found the current game lives on quite a precarious balance; There is a Japanese version with around 65 possible letters, and the secret word being 4 letters, but this turns out to be significantly harder, with the game rules adjusted accordingly to allow up to 12 tries. Despite being able to play it in my mother tongue, I found it less fun. Tweaking the formula (even in English) will likely require lot of thought into re-balancing.
5 letters gives enough options without requiring the player to have access to a lot of guesses to have any hope of winning, and gives the game a short playtime.
It's built to be quick to play. You can play it on a commute, or dip in a few times throughout the day.
You wouldn't have that progress visible to players with a larger problem space. Tangentially, you'd also wind up having to lean more on "technical" (as in scoped to a particular domain, not technological) language in order to fill the list. That limits access to those outside of that field of study.
There will be one ad but it will be Punch the Monkey and it will hover over the keyboard until you go to type. It will then move to the row below the one you are guessing.
The question is: would anyone pay low seven figures just for the privilege of hiding the same thing? They'd expect this investment to return few times. They'd either start pushing "better" (different) version to subscribed people, splitting the community. Or, as you mentioned, introduce ads. But I don't think just acquiring a channel to display ads was the goal (the article mentions the goal to grow subscriber base), because it's a fad that will fade away- good chances are this will happen before they manage to show enough ads to recoup the initial investment.
The NYTimes mobile app has a section at the very bottom of the scroll with 5(+1) games. The +1 is for the crossword puzzle, which is included in mini form whole the full chonker requires its own subscription. I image they are going to give wordle top billing in the section. Maybe there'll be a page anyone can visit, but I think they'll use it to keep subscribers returning to the app daily, having to scroll past something they'll want to read on their way, seeing some adds and giving them one more reason not to stop the renewal charges.
Nah, you can actually solve it really fast if you have a few goto starting words. I use house, trail and one more I can't remember now. Longest I ever spent since then on Wordle has been maybe 3 minutes.
I disagree. In fact I'd say no one comes to wordle just to play a word game for 5 minutes and then forget about it. People share their solution grids all over the internet and private groups. They discuss their strategies and favorite start words. Late night hosts all play it on their shows. There's a new Wordle meme trending on Twitter every day. Heck people are so passionate about it that online backlash forced Apple to remove clones from the App Store and Twitter to remove bots that post spoilers – in under a day.
If 73% of millennials started tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?
Social media is a communication tool. What you’re seeing is evidence that normal human beings share interests and discuss them. That is not automatic evidence that the interest needs to be technologically exploited at the source. That this is not immediately clear is a significant driver behind the most reprehensible parts of the computing industry. I also think you’re overlooking that “I solved it in four! Yay!” is a mild extension of the anecdotes you’re hearing about five minutes and forget (they’re not mutually exclusive). I bet even the engineers who spent the last couple weekends solving for the optimal word are ready to put that bag down, too, and are probably just as strongly in that five minute group.
It already has a Share button that is implemented in the most respectful way possible for a user. Wordle’s backlog is precisely zero items long. Anything you’d do to it to consider social media would make it fundamentally worse. That you think it’s a social network in waiting leaves a metallic taste in my mouth and a bunch of despair for where we are.
> If 73% of millennials started tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?
This is HN, do you really want to know how that question would be answered?
> If 73% of millennials started tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?
We could, biogas digestors are a thing :-); we do plumbing is a highly paid profession and people waste enormous amounts of ressources (think of all that water we waste!) to take a crap in "the right environment" even though imo "Turkish" toilets provide a better position for bowel evacuation...
If 73% of millennials starting tweeting about their bowel movements tomorrow, would you be trying to monetize the toilet as the hottest new social network?
I told my Mom I solved last night's Wordle in two. That's making conversation about a shared interest. It's the reprehensible worst of this industry to pivot that interest into exploiting it at the source simply because it exists. Put succinctly: in no rational world is my having a conversation with someone about Wordle evidence that it needs a Sign in with Facebook button.
It already has a share button, implemented in probably the most respectful way possible. Absolutely nothing needs to be changed. Wordle is perfect user-respecting technology in any way. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that every change you have in mind to improve it will make it significantly worse because you disagree with my assessment.
I can say that it captured my social group precisely because 1) the clipboard-based sharing works just as well in our private chat as it does on Twitter or Facebook and 2) the total lack of ads, monetization, or growth-hacking gimmicks meant that people felt comfortable sharing their results without feeling like they're spamming their friends.
I played it this way. And then I showed my wife and kids. For a few days we played over the family group chat. But now I'm on a group Messages chat with my wife's family (they are all non-techies). They all started playing it independent of us and we just got added to the group.
It's funny how it spreads... the ease of sharing results is what I think has really driven the popularity.
I wonder, for a person who was posting their Wordle solutions to Facebook, Twitter and Discord under accounts that they were trying to keep separate, how many posts it would take to uniquely identify somebody. It must be only a handful, at most.
Anyway, that's a pretty constructed scenario, but it is sorta interesting to think about.
In any case -- fortunately it is NYT, so I bet they'll happily just let it go to a nice stable daily crossword sized population and stick there indefinitely without messing it up. Maybe they can add a 6-wordle for subscribers.
A single day holds at an absolute maximum of 3^30 different combinations but in practice it's probably much less than that because people converge to more green boxes (generally) as they guess more. I'd bet by 3 days though you've provided a unique set of answers.
That's the ballpark I was thinking, too. The only wrench I can think of that might get thrown into it -- there are some known popular starters and popular guessing styles. If you go for, say, ARISE and then hunt vowels, I bet the number of collisions could be strung along a bit longer.
I mean they don't come to Wordle to do that they play wordle and go other places. I would not have played it if it wanted me to log in and link my socials or recreate my social graph to share.
When I said people don't go to wordle for a social network I mean wordle comes to whatever social grouping you already have because it's so simple and easy to share. It's not a social network it's a thing people do socially which is vastly different.
There is one freemium model for Wordle that has seemed obvious to me since the first time I launched it on a laptop after playing the first few on mobile: sync. The emphasis on historical play data and streaks make portable continuity a premium good for this particular game.
I had actually kind of been hoping Wardle would have the same idea and that I would at some point be able to pay a few dollars a year for an account I could sign into to keep my Wordle career in sync. It looks like that account will now be an NYT account, and while it won't make me a subscriber by itself, it's one more benefit to weigh in potentially subscribing at some point.
Wordle would actually fit in perfectly with the NYT crossword app.
The business model is that you get the latest puzzle for free and you can pay a subscription to get access to old ones. Not sure how much money they make, but I've paid more to them than most apps in the store.
They could already have cloned the game—even if the mechanics were novel, which they are not. The thing isn't even at a relevant domain name. I don't see how they bought anything but the name "Wordle" here—and, hell, maybe that alone is worth seven figures. God knows I'd have sold it for that, if it were mine.
Sure, I'm not saying it was a dumb move at that price. Depends on how much staying-power the fad has, I guess.
Though when I first tried to find it a couple weeks ago, Wordle was not the top result for "Wordle". Result 3 or 4 IIRC. But I'd expect NYT can fix that.
Thez bought a redirrct from the current website to their domain. At some point in time all wordle players will move to nytimes.com/wordle or similar at least once.
In case anyone interested in a NYT games subscription didn't know this it is half price if you also have a NYT newspaper subscription. If your games subscription is set up to auto-renew it stays at half price even if you no longer have a NYT newspaper subscription when the games subscription renews.
I've found[0] https://timewarple.com/ which allows me to play older wordles. It requires you go in order 0 & beyond, button to advance is in the statistics tab after you complete the current round.
The Mini is free. The main one seems to be sub/app only. The bee one lets you enter a few words and then throws up a paywall. On iOS, I cannot get the keyboard to appear on Mini as of the last few weeks, so stopped visiting completely.
It could simply be content for their offering. Like when Netflix buys the right to a movie, they don't inject ads into it, it simply makes a Netflix subscription marginally more enticing.
And for the NYT, a company that made a $55M profit last quarter, it's probably a good bet.
I am a regular user of the NYT games page. As long as you have adblock enabled its a pretty good experience. For some games they might post a leaderboard and certain games like the crossword require you to have a subscription. But many others are free and have no login requirement such as the Spelling Bee [1].
Yes me too, and it confused me. Does that mean I got all the possible words? I got around sixteen IIRC, but feel like there might be more? I don't know, but that screen is a dead end which doesn't either make that clear or let me go back.
And BTW I'm using Chrome with uBlock Origin enabled here.
I've got that screen after a couple of words. It might be point-based because I swear I got it very early after getting an 8-10 letter word. Other times it doesn't show up for 15ish words.
The NYT daily mini crossword is free. I bet they just want easy, habit forming things to get people to check their site once a day. Add a 6-wordle for subscribers or something and it fits in perfectly.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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
" 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'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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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”.
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
Spelling Bee already is free and shares many qualities with Wordle: one puzzle per day, simple premise... I wonder if you see them try to add more "sharing" features to it. I see people share redacted screenshots of Spelling Bee every once in a while, but it's more work to do that.
I don't think it's all that cheap. The NYT acquisition makes sense to me, and it makes sense to me that he could spend a lot more time on the app and make (more) money with it directly. But I don't see the option (3) of some other 7-8 figure acquirer, just because the NYT already has a business unit that you can drop word games into and print money out of, and nobody else really does at the same level.
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.
Cloning it wouldn't have got them the publicity. They'll be in news bulletins around the world. They'll own the name and trade dress, I bet they can sell enough merch alone by Christmas to pay for the acquisition.
How do you monetize a game that already has an ad-less web version which works 100% offline and has hardcoded enough words to continue working until 2028? I can literally "save as" the html and the js bundle, put them in a folder, and play it every day until 2028 without any problems. Let alone the thousands of free rip offs out there.
Writing code does not make for a finished project.
This guy got the deal because he had the user base. I don't know how much of that was luck, how much was smart iterating over a simple idea until it "clicked" with heaps of people, or how much of it was subtle but powerful viral marketing tactics.
You're right, I suspect 75+% of people here could have a working implementation of this in an afternoon. But none of us did. And none of us have over a million DAU. And none of us closed a deal with NYTimes. Josh did. In 4 months. While holding down a day job. Major respect from me.
The idea and code is about as worthless as the idea of selling identical hamburgers everywhere across the globe. An "easy" idea and plan to have. McDonalds out-executed pretty much everyone there.
that he built the first prototype in 2013. So it's not exactly an overnight success.
From the same article, he says the two big changes he made were that
1/ the first prototype allowed for continuous play, ie when you got one word right it immediately offered another, instead of having one word per day
2/ the list of possible 5-letter words was reduced to "common" words (you can guess using all existing words, but the words to be discovered are usual ones, not obscure words nobody ever uses).
The second element is a kind of "dumbing down" that broadens the audience, and the first one clearly has a social element to it.
I'm not sure where NYT is doing here. It's not like the idea can be patented, and the popularity has not been proven anything other than a Twitter fad. It's the next Sudoku - it's already been cracked to be absolutely brain-dead simple to cheat.
McDonalds is a weird analogy to bring up, as the end product is absolute lowest common denominator trash food.
But yeah - all the best to Mr. Dan - lottery ticket printed out. Users as the product and all that.
And literally nobody except Josh has closed a million buck deal for it...
It kinda proves my McDonalds point (however bad an example that might be). Nobody even needed to think up the word game idea. Anybody (at least in this site's demographic) could build it. McDonalds are pretty much the only organisation that've succeeded in opening up burger joints across the globe, even though it's an easy idea and making burgers isn't hard.
Didn't an HN user create the ultimate "basic programming exercise" with a bingo card creator? It's never about how simple the implementation is, it's a mix of factors including timing, execution, luck, and finally, implementation.
The site has a lot of potential but developing that potential is a lot of work. "in the low seven figures" is a nice payday. The guy can probably retire and have the freedom to do whatever he wants. Good for him...
Considering there is no revenue at all right now, and he’s likely spending thousands on hosting, he was probably dying to offload it. Especially bec there’s 100s of knockoffs now.
> Considering there is no revenue at all right now, and he’s likely spending thousands on hosting, he was probably dying to offload it.
Thousands?
It's a 60kb Javascript file, seems quite static to all users, and appears to be cached and delivered from CloudFlare. I don't think their free accounts have bandwidth limits, just feature limits, so... it's probably more "pennies" on hosting than "thousands." Given the popularity of it, it's a good bet that it's almost always in the CF cache, so very few requests going through to the origin.
This is more of a "You could host it on a home ISP" type project with how well caching systems handle it. Or toss it in a Google Cloud Storage bucket, which has reduced egress fees to CF and it'll still be constantly cached.
Nothing I see indicates it's the slightest bit expensive to host.
> put Cloudflare in front of my website; then more recently, we migrated the hosting to Amazon S3, which can scale indefinitely as long as I’m happy to pay for it.
...
> it does cost me a bit to keep the servers up to run Wordle
It shouldn’t… It would be free on github pages, netlify, and others. Cloudflare should make anywhere else effectively free, as well. It’s likely a decision to reuse whatever existing hosting/deploy strategy he uses for the rest of his site or just apathy towards spending however much is being spent.
I think part of the success of wordle was the network effect of having a single word to share your success or failure with everyone who's playing. For a group of friends you could probably get people to switch but there's still the wider population effect of the shared puzzle each day. That second is much harder for any copycats to replicate.
Did the dev had some copyright/patents on the game? Why didn't the NY Times just clone it? Surely they could have leverage their users to start to use their version?
> 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.