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.
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.
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?
*Do people still know that this is a lot of money, and that most companies are not able to raise this much capital?
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 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 prefer Kottke's take:
https://kottke.org/22/02/wordle-sold-to-the-ny-times-and-tha...
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.
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.
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.
It wasn't work, it was play.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
worrying about that as an anti-trust issue is beyond the pale
