They bought eyes and personal data, probably for a steal.
But I don't bemoan the Wardle heehee guy who sold it. I'm very happy for him.
The game concept isn't unique. It just struck a nice balance of complexity and simplicity that satisfied a large audience. It reminds me of Threes game in that way.
As for the commercialization, "This is the way of things." That's fine. There will be more good ideas, and the beauty here is that we are now all free to build them with less distraction. Maybe you'll build something fun and get rich, without having to go through a FAANG (or is it now MAANG?) interview series.
I did the math on this recently. Supposedly NYT paid $3m for Wordle. The NYT games subscription that includes their crossword and potentially Wordle is $40/year. If they put Wordle behind their games subscription, they would need 75k new users to break even in one year. That seems realistic given how popular Wordle is.
I'll also speak anecdotally. As someone who has done the NYT crossword every day for several years... Wordle + the social sharing has been scratching the same itch and I've actually stopped doing the daily NYT crossword. So buying Wordle could also be protective of their existing revenue.
I think your last point is pretty solid — and since Wordle has this interesting angle of not supporting binging, there's an interesting possibility of a gentle upsell (“23 hours until the next Wordle, have you done today's Bee?”)
That's a great point. They could keep Wordle free as lead gen for their paid games subscription. That's probably more profitable than making Wordle paid.
Yeah, thinking about this more definitely makes me curious about what their targets are for this. They paid a fair amount of money up front but keeping the lights on is basically trivial.
But I don't bemoan the Wardle heehee guy who sold it. I'm very happy for him.
The game concept isn't unique. It just struck a nice balance of complexity and simplicity that satisfied a large audience. It reminds me of Threes game in that way.
As for the commercialization, "This is the way of things." That's fine. There will be more good ideas, and the beauty here is that we are now all free to build them with less distraction. Maybe you'll build something fun and get rich, without having to go through a FAANG (or is it now MAANG?) interview series.