all good things
January 31, 2022 2:04 PM   Subscribe

The New York Times Buys Wordle (NYT; archive.is link).
Wordle was purchased from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price “in the low seven figures,” The Times said. The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players.
posted by fight or flight (159 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
Dordle is better, anyway.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:07 PM on January 31, 2022 [8 favorites]


Well, it was nice while it lasted.
posted by Capt. Renault at 2:08 PM on January 31, 2022 [58 favorites]


Good for him. Monetize your viral success before the 15 minutes are up.
posted by allegedly at 2:09 PM on January 31, 2022 [152 favorites]


I wish nothing but the best to Wardle. Thanks, Josh.
posted by SPrintF at 2:10 PM on January 31, 2022 [36 favorites]


Great for him! But "initially remain free" means that it won't be at some point and I'll move onto one of the alternatives by then.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:10 PM on January 31, 2022 [12 favorites]


Their mini crossword is still free, I think.
posted by Oyéah at 2:13 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]


It's funny to me how mad some people are about this. A game they first played only 4-6 weeks ago. I like free games too but it's such a selfish backlash! Maybe it will stay free; as the article and the post say, that's the "initially" plan.

My happiness in his success is colored in part because I first played with Wordle seven months ago, early access via a friend of the author. It's not really the game for me but I appreciate the polish of what he created. I'm happy to see him succeed and going out at the peak rather than watching this slowly fall out of fashion.

BTW not a whole lot changed from the first version I saw last June. Some polish, a few minor improvements. I think the big enabler was adding the "share your score" mode with the boxes; that's what enabled the viral marketing that resulted in it becoming so huge.
posted by Nelson at 2:15 PM on January 31, 2022 [25 favorites]


I'm not fully aware of how these things work: will the NYT be able to send sternly worded lawyer-backed letters to the creators of the alternative games to ask them to change their formats now they've purchased it?

I remember Threes had a particular problem with this with ripoffs and cloned versions of the original game appearing everywhere almost overnight once it got popular, but the developers weren't able to really do anything about it besides occasionally get them removed from various app stores in an increasingly futile battle.
posted by fight or flight at 2:15 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


[ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
posted by BlunderingArtist at 2:16 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


I wish him well and I'm pleased for his success, but at least some part of the appeal was the uncluttered, no-anything website, it was a pleasant respite from the rest of the web, so if that changes, I shall likely stop. I'd happily pay 5$ for a years subscription to the exact same thing w/ no ads of any kind, probably.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 2:17 PM on January 31, 2022 [64 favorites]


Somehow I'm not surprised to hear this.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:19 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]


You can’t copyright the central game design, so I guess they’re just getting the brand and a particular implementation?
posted by Going To Maine at 2:20 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


Wordle felt like a nice throwback to an era of the internet where someone would just make a neat website and put it online and people would enjoy it and that's all, so the wordle guy cashing in is kinda disappointing, but if Will Shortz offered me a million bucks for a game I probably spent two days putting together (and am probably spending increasingly more money hosting) I'd take it in a nanosecond.

And they already have the mini crossword and Spelling Bee for free, Wordle fits in alongside those. I'd be surprised if they started charging money for it anytime soon.

I hope they don't try to shut down all the cool variants like Dordle and Absurdle. The last month or so has been a little renaissance for word games and I would hate to see that get lawyered away.
posted by theodolite at 2:21 PM on January 31, 2022 [45 favorites]


Wordle #999 X/6

WARDL
MAKES
PAPER
SINCE
TIMES
ASSET
posted by Wandering_Boots at 2:24 PM on January 31, 2022 [20 favorites]


Seven figures for a five-letter word game.

.
posted by guiseroom at 2:28 PM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]


The brand and implementation is everything here right? It's not an original game design.
posted by little onion at 2:30 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players.

Like the cooking subsite, where they scraped people's suggestions and recipe modifications from comments before charging money.

Eh. It was fun while it lasted, I guess.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:30 PM on January 31, 2022 [8 favorites]


Sorry I got another one I needed to get out to encompass my concern around the word "INITIALLY":

Wordle #1000 X/6

USERS
SADLY
AWAIT
FATED
CATCH,
COINS
posted by Wandering_Boots at 2:33 PM on January 31, 2022 [5 favorites]


I'm simultaneously happy that this guy is making a lot of money for a real good idea he had, and pissed about the ongoing narrative that "someone has an idea that sparks innocent joy without even a seeming asterisk" always ends in "and gets rewarded for it by our Very Good Society that makes sure everyone gets their just desserts, followed by at least 10 books about what this moment of joy teaches you if you want to Live The Hustle Lifestyle."

Not to deprive this guy of his happiness and comfort, because I literally can't and he does not remotely care what I think, but those little pure joys are really uncommon, and having that turn into a New York Times enterprise this quickly is kind of a bummer. Not in an "I'm gonna write a thought piece about this" way, just a kind of low guttural "ugh."
posted by rorgy at 2:33 PM on January 31, 2022 [33 favorites]


Also I was just looking for glove recommendations on The Wirecutter and reflecting on how much shittier it's gotten since its NYT acquisition, so.
posted by rorgy at 2:34 PM on January 31, 2022 [30 favorites]


Ugh great so now the friends pestering me to play wordle and the friends sending me useless links to NYT Cooking recipes can be the same friends.

Also I was just looking for glove recommendations on The Wirecutter and reflecting on how much shittier it's gotten since its NYT acquisition, so.

God, yes.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:39 PM on January 31, 2022 [9 favorites]


Yeah if this goes the way of the Wirecutter, it really was just nice while it lasted.
posted by bxvr at 2:43 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


The best part of the spelling bee is also social: Sending my favorite-not-actually-a-word guesses to my friends who also do the Bee... "Airwolf" was the best one yesterday. And I think my all time favorite was 'Phomo', which is the feeling one gets when missing out on good Vietnamese food.
posted by kaibutsu at 2:48 PM on January 31, 2022 [35 favorites]


Cool. Good for him.

(For those complaining about it, you would have lost interest in a few months anyway, so no real loss.

No, no, you know it’s true)
posted by Galvanic at 2:48 PM on January 31, 2022 [25 favorites]


Yeah if this goes the way of the Wirecutter, it really was just nice while it lasted.

RIP to Wordle's indispensable editorial content
posted by wemayfreeze at 2:49 PM on January 31, 2022 [42 favorites]


I like how it's a seemingly universal opinion that the game will now go to shit, and what that says about the market economy.
posted by Capt. Renault at 2:53 PM on January 31, 2022 [25 favorites]


Congrats to Josh for now being able to afford to buy a shitty one bedroom apartment in the worst corner of his current neighborhood.
posted by saladin at 2:53 PM on January 31, 2022 [10 favorites]


Well those wirecutter folks where getting a pretty raw deal. But over the last few purchases informed by them a number have been duds. But part of that is really just knowing what I wanted the things for, and how I would use them. Still a bit cheesed about the leaky coffee machine. I think wirecutter would be greatly improved if it easily provided their prior recommendations and more info any reasons they changed them.

As for Wordle. Well congrats kid. I think people like puzzles, and NYT is just assembling a modern collection of them as a value added thing. A thing that they will certainly bundle together in a fashion that irritates the largest fans while providing a slightly worse but ad supported acceptable version for the vast majority of users.
posted by zenon at 2:54 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]


I'm glad he made some nice money.
posted by theora55 at 2:56 PM on January 31, 2022 [9 favorites]


> Dordle is better anyway

I know! And it should be a bargain in the low 14 figures.

For real though, he held out for a while with the no ads thing, and I salute him for that. But once people start backing up the trucks full of cash? I mean you can't let it go to waste, can you.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 2:59 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


But part of that is really just knowing what I wanted the things for, and how I would use them. Still a bit cheesed about the leaky coffee machine.

See, that is the problem with my current coffee machine...no leaks!?! Off to Wirecutter to replace it....
posted by amanda at 3:02 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


RIP to Wordle's indispensable editorial content

That's nothing; just wait until Judith Miller starts writing thinkpieces threatening regime change if they don't add six-letter words.
posted by Mayor West at 3:13 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


Oh well, nothing good goes untarnished these days. Honestly after the game didn't accept "gnoll" as a guess I kind of fell out of love anyway.

I can't imagine how they would fuck the game up itself, but I'm never going to NYT website to do it to build a habit out of it, let alone subscribe.
posted by GoblinHoney at 3:19 PM on January 31, 2022 [7 favorites]


I am happy for Wardle but sad for me -- the feeling is reminiscent of when a friend moves away for good, happy reasons, but I am still sad they won't be nearby anymore.

The "good for him" far outweighs the sad, but the sad is still there.

Maybe they will just stick an annoying banner at the top and otherwise leave it be.
posted by the primroses were over at 3:19 PM on January 31, 2022 [19 favorites]


On the one hand, someone dangles "low seven figures", I can't blame someone for knowing when the shelf-life of their moment in the spotlight is ticking away.
On the other hand, was the Guardian lowballing? The Daily Mail too slow on the draw?
On the gripping hand, it looks like it'll have all the shelf-life of a sliced melon once they start trying to squeeze it, so "extract a sack-o-cash in return for something that'll be difficult for them to recoup the payout for" feels like a bit of a win-win to me.
posted by CrystalDave at 3:19 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


Good for him. Get out while the getting is good!
posted by nubs at 3:26 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]


I don’t blame Wardle one bit. He randomly made up a custom puzzle game for his partner, then let a few friends and relatives in on it, and before he knew it he was the toast of the Internet. And rightly so! Sounds like it got overwhelming pretty quickly, though.

I assume NYT will stink it up, though I’ll be happy to be proven wrong. If nothing else, it’ll be a fun little fad I got to share with the world at a time in history when we weren’t connecting over much.
posted by armeowda at 3:26 PM on January 31, 2022 [9 favorites]


does the original website author (the real inventor) get a cut?
posted by j_curiouser at 3:29 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


I won't play Wordle until the NYT prints a front-page story on what a pee-pee head Joe Rogan is.
posted by valkane at 3:29 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


Now, will the NYTimes mint an NFT for Wordle? Let's web 3.0 the shit out of it!
posted by nubs at 3:30 PM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]


Now I can start guessing with

TIMES
YCAKE
posted by riverlife at 3:33 PM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]


If you're worried about it going away, you can download the page and it will just keep working. (You may have to change one script tag from "main.e65ce0a5.js" to "Wordle_files/main.js" depending on what your browser does.) That's because Wordle chooses the word of the day based on the current date, out of a preloaded list that's already part of the web page. It never talks to a server for wordlists, answer checking, scoring, any of that. (You might lose scoreboard tracking.)

Everyone who does this will keep getting the same words as each other. (Just don't peek at the Javascript files, or you'll see the next few thousand days' words, in order!)
posted by Belostomatidae at 3:34 PM on January 31, 2022 [57 favorites]


I can't find it, but some wag on twitter said: "Now if you solve Wordle in two guesses it unlocks a special editorial from David Brooks where he complains about soup not being hot enough anymore."
posted by valkane at 3:45 PM on January 31, 2022 [50 favorites]


I can’t find it, but some wag on twitter said: “Now if you solve Wordle in two guesses it unlocks a special editorial from David Brooks where he complains about soup not being hot enough anymore.”

boop
posted by Going To Maine at 3:49 PM on January 31, 2022 [6 favorites]


Honestly after the game didn't accept "gnoll" as a guess I kind of fell out of love anyway.

Pleased that I wasn't the only one that made that guess.
posted by SPrintF at 3:52 PM on January 31, 2022 [6 favorites]


Buy Lewdle you cowards.
posted by heyitsgogi at 4:00 PM on January 31, 2022 [10 favorites]


The fact that the post about a solo developer selling a daily word game for Xmillion dollars to a newspaper has nearly twice the comments of a post about a multinational electronixs corporation buying a legendary FPS game development studio for Xbillion dollars speaks to why Metafilter is my kind of place.
posted by subocoyne at 4:00 PM on January 31, 2022 [18 favorites]


Good for Josh. But, sigh.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 4:07 PM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]


This makes me genuinely sad. I love Wordle, and will be sad to let it go because I am sure as hell not giving any money to the NYT. Wordle became a fun thing to do before work with my spouse, comparing our start words and our paths.
posted by Kitteh at 4:18 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


Man, I haven't seen this much grousing about a newspaper taking over a beloved word game since Martin Naydel got set up with cocaine for life after selling Jumble to Tribune Content Agency in 1957

re wirecutter: was always pretty terrible; exists entirely so you can avoid subscribing to consumer reports and pretend you're not your dad
posted by phooky at 4:20 PM on January 31, 2022 [26 favorites]


On the other hand, was the Guardian lowballing? The Daily Mail too slow on the draw?

Does the game even permit British English spelling?

legendary FPS game development studio

At this point more people are playing Wordle than that studio's single actively-developed game, which is already five years old.
posted by Apocryphon at 4:21 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


To be honest, I think the NYT acquisition might be a nearly best-case scenario because for me: 1) the original developer gets paid out, thus reaping a monetary reward for bringing so much fun to this bleak world, and 2) now I don't need to feel guilty at all about playing any of the cloned versions.
posted by mhum at 4:25 PM on January 31, 2022 [13 favorites]


I agree that this is a best case scenario. The New York Times has great word games. The games are presented simply, with a focus on the words. Unlike the vast majority of games out there, the NYTimes games are crushed by video advertisements and constant upsells to buy 10 golden tokens to use for hints. It's a relief to know that Wordle has found a home where it's essential character will persist.

Will it be free forever? I don't know. But the vast majority of games that are free suck because of that. They have to find other ways to make money to keep the game alive, and those things tend to be awful. It's great that it's free for a little while longer, at least, and that it won't become what the Scrabble app has become.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 4:32 PM on January 31, 2022 [14 favorites]


dammit, who knew the next Tetris was a goddamn word search game
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 4:35 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]


Took me a second to parse "low seven figures." So, somewhere between one and four million dollars? Yow.
posted by mediareport at 4:35 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


I think a lot of people assuming this will destroy Wordle maybe are not super familiar with NYT's games section? It fits right in with what they already have, to the point where I'm not sure what they would change about it. Wirecutter comparisons are understandable (and it really does suck now) but not really relevant. They've said it will remain free for now, as several of their games are.

And I understand the romantic appeal of this nice little game made and maintained by one guy, but I started to wonder if it was going to get unsustainable for one person to continue hosting a game millions of people play - as a hobby. I remember reading he was overwhelmed by its success and it is probably treading that line of being cool and making his life worse. So good for him.
posted by lunasol at 4:43 PM on January 31, 2022 [25 favorites]


So as to not clutter up this thread, I've posted a question on AskMe: Why is Wirecutter bad now and what are some alternatives?
posted by gwint at 4:48 PM on January 31, 2022 [6 favorites]


You may be thinking of this Guardian article, lunasol:

“It going viral doesn’t feel great to be honest. I feel a sense of responsibility for the players. I feel I really owe it to them to keep things running and make sure everything’s working correctly...I need to be really thoughtful. It’s not my full-time job and I don’t want it to become a source of stress and anxiety in my life. If I do make any changes, I would like to think they are changes I would have made even if it was just [my partner and I] playing.”
posted by mediareport at 4:49 PM on January 31, 2022 [6 favorites]


The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players.

You have nearly used up your 3 free Wordles per month. Subscribe now for unlimited access.
posted by rodlymight at 4:50 PM on January 31, 2022 [23 favorites]


The best part of the spelling bee is also social: Sending my favorite-not-actually-a-word guesses to my friends who also do the Bee

This is like ... one-third of my camera roll. Except I don't know anyone who plays it. I save them for my own enjoyment.

Anyway, Wordle isn't really for me -- it's the kind of puzzle I would rather write an algorithm to solve than to do it by hand -- but man, goooooood for Wardle. Really, this is awesome news.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:50 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


“It going viral doesn’t feel great to be honest. I feel a sense of responsibility for the players. I feel I really owe it to them to keep things running and make sure everything’s working correctly...I need to be really thoughtful. It’s not my full-time job and I don’t want it to become a source of stress and anxiety in my life. If I do make any changes, I would like to think they are changes I would have made even if it was just [my partner and I] playing.”

Matt Haughey says what?
posted by valkane at 4:52 PM on January 31, 2022 [7 favorites]


You have nearly used up your 3 free Wordles per month. Subscribe now for unlimited access.

The NYTimes Mini is free to play, every day; you can go into the past with the subscription. I suspect that their model for Wordle will be pretty similar.
posted by kdar at 4:53 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


So I have not played any Wordle and I’m not getting why it’s so big. Can someone please explain like I’m 85?
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 4:54 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]


@GadyEpstein: Wordle was tailor-made for Twitter. But the acquisition of Wordle by the NYT was *really* tailor-made for Twitter
posted by Going To Maine at 4:55 PM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]


So I have not played any Wordle and I’m not getting why it’s so big. Can someone please explain like I’m 85?

It’s a fun little puzzle with words, a nice interface, shareable results and stat tracking, and everyone else is doing it. Or, if you want obscenely longer opinions: posted by Going To Maine at 4:58 PM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]


Funny thing about the hosting cost: Wordle's website is around 70 kilobytes of data and entirely static and cacheable. If the entire population of the US played it, that would be less than 23 terabytes of data. That would cost <$1000 per month to serve from Amazon S3, assuming it was set to cache for 1 month. Not an estimate of actual cost, several of those assumptions are wrong in different directions; just showing that hosting it need not be very expensive.
posted by joeyh at 4:58 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


Well, imagine that you have a cryptocoin, but instead of coins, there are letters, and instead of a distributed ledger, there's a sequence of five-letter words. Now, you can "mint" repeated guesses, but only up to a certain limit. When you've completed minting your guesses, you've "mined" your game, which is then published to the "blockchain", which is twitter. If you mine your Wordle in less than four mintings, then your twitter icon turns into a hexagon.

(people haven't been this pissed since Donald Crasswurd sold his "letters in boxes" puzzle to Le Monde in 1483)
posted by phooky at 5:00 PM on January 31, 2022 [22 favorites]


There was probably a bidding war, right? Conde Nast and Vox Media are probably at home pouting right now.
posted by mediareport at 5:02 PM on January 31, 2022


The entire world is becoming a jukebox.

Jukebox-i-fication is released under the new Creative Commons.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 5:02 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


According to Google Trends it was a month from obscurity to international notoriety, all organic marketing. I think it's almost as contagious as Omicron.
posted by credulous at 5:10 PM on January 31, 2022 [5 favorites]


if people are really going to quit doing Wordle in rage because of this, Guess My Word is fairly similar and still 100% indepedant.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:15 PM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]


Took me a second to parse "low seven figures." So, somewhere between one and four million dollars? Yow.

I take home something in the low seven figures, if you count the cents as well.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:25 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


So, will British spellings now be banned? I wonder if the PLAY AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE site will stay up?
posted by Ideefixe at 5:36 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


I kind of knew something like this was coming when I read that the author didn't want to release the source code.

The fundamental problem is corporations buying out technology, rather than actually coming up with their own ideas and implementations, and NYTimes is just another example of this broad practice. It is a way of killing small businesses and autonomy of labor, and has far reaching consequences as per the thread about technofeudalism as explained by Varoufakis.
posted by polymodus at 5:51 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


So it’s Mastermind except with letters?
posted by bendy at 5:52 PM on January 31, 2022 [7 favorites]


The choice of just going on the way he started was not really open to Wardle.

He'd already been completely ripped off once (see the earlier Techdirt post alluded to in that link) and there was no way he would have been able to protect it from people equally unscrupulous but more sophisticated.

Some bigger entity was necessary if Wardle was going to get anything out of it at all.
posted by jamjam at 5:55 PM on January 31, 2022 [6 favorites]


Good on Wardle for cashing out before the game fades into obscurity.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:06 PM on January 31, 2022 [6 favorites]


I'm glad for him that he gets a nice payday out of this. And I already pay for Games due to using Spelling Bee to get through the 2020 primary season with my mental health approximately intact and in the process accidentally developing a crossword habit. So, this just means it will become slightly easier to remember to do Wordle every day.

I think there's a good chance NYT will keep it free for a long time, maybe forever. I'm sure it'll more than pay for itself for the near future by bringing new viral traffic to Games and growing their subscription numbers. And frankly I don't think Wordle takes enough time for it to be worth a subscription for most people? It's like a five minute diversion. I really think it's worth more to its new overlords free.
posted by potrzebie at 6:10 PM on January 31, 2022 [3 favorites]


I would not be surprised if a substantial burden on Wardle, more than the technology maintenance, and in addition to legal stuff as jamjam mentions,* is that he is besieged by people with opinions about the puzzle, sometimes rather impolitely. That will probably not end entirely after the NYT transfer but I would guess it would partially dissipate.

* If I infer correctly, he was not particularly bothered by other people creating and publishing clones and riffs that were free-to-play and ad-free. Other people running clones that charged the user any money, or ripped them off with malware-infected ads, were piggybacking on a thing he had made in order to deceive and hurt others, and that bothered him.
posted by brainwane at 6:12 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


🄰🄻🄰🅂 🄿🄾🄾🅁
🅆🄾🅁🄳🄻🄴
🅆🄴 🄷🄰🅁🄳🄻🅈
🄺🄽🄴🅆 🅈🄴
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:31 PM on January 31, 2022 [7 favorites]


Metafilter: still 100% indepedant
posted by zamboni at 6:31 PM on January 31, 2022 [5 favorites]


I think people seeing something like Wordle, that exists for its own sake and is content to be a small but pleasant part of your day, exist, and then get bought out by a corporation who immediately promises that they'll monetise it somehow, now have a window into why so many millennials who grew up on the internet are socialists.

The whole internet used to be like this. We're nostalgic for the post-capitalist future we lived in.
posted by Merus at 6:45 PM on January 31, 2022 [35 favorites]


Metafilter: still 100% indepedant

Indepedantic, surely.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:47 PM on January 31, 2022 [18 favorites]


The whole internet used to be like this. We're nostalgic for the post-capitalist future we lived in.

But also, like jesus christ, if The Internet becomes interested in Your Thing in 2022, I just assume it brings a steaming pile of Problems in one way or another. Wordle is almost unique in that it was such a tiny app that serving it to a billion people isn't a real problem. But I just assume (cesspool of humanity being what it is) that it's still not fun after a while. So a cool free thing that makes it big seems destined to become a hot potato, which should either pay you for dealing with the Problems, or can be sold off to someone who is interested in dealing with it.

And yeah, that's depressing as hell.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:53 PM on January 31, 2022 [11 favorites]


I'm surprised at how upset I am that people are *at all* negative about this or framing it as any even slight form of moral failing on the part of the maker. Did we want him to do labor "for the exposure?" "For the love of the game?" Is this like teachers who should take low salaries because they're getting satisfaction out of working with kids? He made something he loved that made people happy and he got rewarded by a capitalist society for it at its peak rather than being broken by the stress and demands of a growing fanbase. Fairy tale ending.

(I get that we're mad that it's going to be monetized,of course. But if so, then part of what supports non-commodity community is jumping in to support things, not just consuming others labor. Most people here get this - at a minimum everyone here paid $5 to be here and continues to support. So maybe I shouldn't be upset. But not so many of the gen pop paid $5 to Wardle.)
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 6:53 PM on January 31, 2022 [21 favorites]


You may have access to Consumer Reports through your local public library's online materials access system....
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:55 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]


The Death of Wordle. The title's a bit much, but it's a nicely written blog post explaining why people are sad to see it bought by the NYTimes.
Wordle was a small site that gained popularity despite not being part of a corporate platform. It was wonderful to see an independent site gain attention for being simple and fun. Wordle was refreshingly free of attention-manipulating dark patterns and pushy monetization. That’s why it’s a shame to see it absorbed, to inevitably become just another feature of one large media company’s portfolio.
I appreciate the folks in this discussion who shared similar comments, it helped me understand better the negative reaction to the sale.
posted by Nelson at 6:56 PM on January 31, 2022 [11 favorites]


Apologies if someone has mentioned this already, but fyi if you just save the page locally, you can play until 2026. There's some editing of cookies or something needed if you want to keep your streak stat going.
posted by juv3nal at 7:10 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


You can’t copyright the central game design, so I guess they’re just getting the brand and a particular implementation?

Yeah, the game mechanic is taken directly from the gameshow Lingo (or a similar predecessor to that). I'm not even sure he trademarked the name given there were previous games on the app store called Wordle. It's a lot of money for a website redirect, as far as I can see.
posted by Gary at 7:15 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'm surprised at how upset I am that people are *at all* negative about this or framing it as any even slight form of moral failing on the part of the maker. Did we want him to do labor "for the exposure?" "For the love of the game?"

The flip side of this is: what if he just made it for fun instead of as a career aspiration and was just sharing it to be nice? Does everything need to be monetized? (Important perspective: I have a blog for fun, and one of my friends keeps pestering me with Ways I Can Spin That To Make Big Bucks, and he cannot quite understand that that's not what I'm doing it for - I'm doing it....for the love of it.)

....I saw an alternate thing happen recently which also is a comment on how Wordle has "made it big" - the browser extension Facebook Purity, which lets people customize their Facebook experience, has recently added an option that lets people filter out their friends' Wordle posts, so if you're not into it you don't have to see a squgiveillion posts from your friends talking only about that and nothing else.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:28 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


Alternative scenarios:

1. Attempt to load up the Wordle page. Get a 404. Later read that the creator had a nervous breakdown and lost his job because of the stress and confusion caused by his 15 minutes of Internet fame. A thousand knockoff Wordles sprout up all over the Internet and in app stores, but they all suck the way cheap clones always suck, and some of them are actively malicious, draining people's bank accounts with a variety of scams.

2. Attempt to load up the Wordle page. Get a notification that the game has been purchased by Zynga, that it is temporarily offline, and that a new improved version will be released soon. Check back every few days, then a couple of months later. After about six months the page loads up with bright neon graphics and splashy background animations and the word FREE in balloon letters. I'm told that if I want to play I have the choice of logging in with Facebook or Google, or getting the Wordle(tm) app from the App Store or Google Play. I get the App Store version, and when I launch it Wordle.app asks for access to my Address Book so I can play Wordle with friends. I decline and the app quits.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 7:31 PM on January 31, 2022 [24 favorites]


#1 seems the most likely because wouldn’t want to get his bandwidth bill for hosting. I’m surprised it lasted that long once it got crazy popular.
posted by jmauro at 7:32 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


Does everything need to be monetized

He was offered A MILLION DOLLARS for a website. In the abstract, yes, everything getting monetized is terrible. But in the specific, a million bucks is a million bucks.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:48 PM on January 31, 2022 [19 favorites]


All the anguished comments here and across the internet reminded me of John Waters' comment, "I'd love to sell out. It's just that nobody has been willing to buy."
posted by PhineasGage at 7:48 PM on January 31, 2022 [14 favorites]


Real time footage of the game designer in his secret underground bunker.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:06 PM on January 31, 2022


Has any MeFite talked about monetizing plates of beans yet because if not, there’s ample supply in this thread alone, ready to be sold
posted by Apocryphon at 8:16 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


free to new and existing players

Is there another kind of player? "The game will be free to former and non-players." What? Just say "free" unless you're being paid by the word.
posted by axiom at 9:14 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]


I'm surprised at how upset I am that people are *at all* negative about this

Well it's not negativity. Read the Varoufakis post from last week, this is not negativity any more than pointing out global climate change is being negative. It's being critical of a thing that is happening, with some measure of blame at corporations (because corporations are human constructs), without necessarily blaming individuals who benefit from it. So no, this is not a fairy tale ending at all, again please check out the Varoufakis piece, ignore the detailed stuff about bitcoins but his whole thing about technofeudal society (as opposed to capitalism) is totally apt and parallels this. And it's not merely negative, it's just being truthful.
posted by polymodus at 9:20 PM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]


Is there another kind of player?

Uh, well technically "new and existing players" does exclude anyone who never has and never will play the game. It will not be free for them. The NYT is going to make them pay... for their insolence.
posted by whatnotever at 9:22 PM on January 31, 2022 [12 favorites]


I don't see any feudalism here. I see someone who exercised their imagination and labor, created something that a lot of people valued, and then someone with more resources offered a mutually beneficial exchange for their IP and effort. Consenting adults. No coercion. The only greedheads here seem to be those users who demand that something they like be provided to them at no cost in perpetuity.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:44 PM on January 31, 2022 [7 favorites]


It's being critical of a thing that is happening, with some measure of blame at corporations (because corporations are human constructs), without necessarily blaming individuals who benefit from it.

It all seems quite critical of The New York Times because everyone loves to hate the NYT, with the implication that they will “ruin” it. But the NYT has a fine, entirely not crappy puzzle section, so it all just seems absurd.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:46 PM on January 31, 2022 [9 favorites]


The flip side of this is: what if he just made it for fun instead of as a career aspiration and was just sharing it to be nice? Does everything need to be monetized?

I mean, I *totally* get that. I think the difficult part for me is that in this particular case, it seems like maybe he *did* do exactly what you said. And lots of people got to enjoy that! For me at least, I don't know if his subsequently accepting an offered financial reward (and stepping away) tarnishes what he did - that's the part that feels uncomfortably ungrateful. It would be cool for me as a consumer if the cute fun indie thing stayed cute and fun and indie. But maybe I'm a bit sad that it feels like the perception of the situation escalates to a binary option where a creator who is offered compensation must choose between martyr and sellout. Honestly, I wish more creators were paid for their work.

(Perhaps relatedly, it's my opinion that regardless of intent, people have a hard time criticizing a situation arising from someone's decision without blaming the individual for making that decision. )
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 10:11 PM on January 31, 2022 [2 favorites]


The fundamental problem is corporations buying out technology, rather than actually coming up with their own ideas and implementations, and NYTimes is just another example of this broad practice. It is a way of killing small businesses and autonomy of labor

For Pete's sake, the guy was tired of running it. No small business is being killed! He was happy to sell it to the Times.

I'm not only happy for Wardle, I'm happy for the NY Times. The news business is tough. The NYT is far from perfect -- I've had something of a love-hate relationship with it over the years -- but it's an important part of our press ecosystem, and in spite of its various missteps, it's still one of our best newspapers. It also employs a vast number of extremely smart, talented, principled people.

Investing in features like this helps the Times continue to remain solvent, and thus independent of any larger media conglomerate, and able to deliver a lot of good journalism every week.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:52 PM on January 31, 2022 [11 favorites]


I kind of knew something like this was coming when I read that the author didn't want to release the source code.

It's all JavaScript. The code is right there, is it not? Unless it's super obfuscated, I don't know how they could keep the code quiet. Even if it is all comanglated and obrepified, it's not like the code is super obscure. Wordle is, so to speak, an open book.
posted by JHarris at 10:58 PM on January 31, 2022 [4 favorites]


Indeed, you can see the code at https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/main.e65ce0a5.js. It doesn't appear like he's spent time trying to obfuscate it. I was kind of charmed to notice that his comments include a link to a Stack Overflow thread that solved one of his problems.

I don't give money to the Times news section since 2016, but do subscribe to the Times puzzle page. I'll still be disappointed if/when this gets paywalled, as it's fun to chat about. It's a great fit for the site, though, even down to design aesthetics.
posted by mark k at 12:25 AM on February 1, 2022 [5 favorites]


Interestingly, today's wordle word is SUCKR
posted by chavenet at 12:26 AM on February 1, 2022


Metafilter: We're nostalgic for the post-capitalist future we lived in.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:09 AM on February 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


I don't think anyone is seriously unhappy that Josh Wardle got paid for his hobby project; he brought a lot of people a lot of joy, and how that gets rewarded in our capitalist hellscape is a fat wad of cash. Unfortunately, someone has to pay him that wad, and none of these people are capable of building something as unassuming and friendly as Wordle, and very few of them will see a viral one-a-day word game as anything other than an asset to be monetised. They just paid seven figures for it. Of course they're going to recoup that investment.
posted by Merus at 1:18 AM on February 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


I agree that Wordle fits very well into the NYT games vibe. And I'm very happy that a developer who made a fun game that people liked got a payout.

I'm not entirely sure what the NYT paid for. If they try to put it behind a paywall, a clone could very easily replace it -- but realistically this would just kill it, the way that the death of Google Reader killed RSS, and the buyout of LiveJournal killed fandom blogging. The magic of Wordle is that everyone is playing the same Wordle, and the moment there's a succession crisis with no clear heir, it's over.

Perhaps the point is just to attract people to their other games, some of which are paywalled. I have a games-only NYT subscription so that I can play the full version of the Spelling Bee -- the kind of person who likes Wordle is also likely to like the Bee and possibly the crosswords. I don't live in the US, so I would never buy a full newspaper subscription, but I like word games, and I imagine other international visitors are in the same position. A bump in international games subscriptions might be profitable enough to make this make sense.
posted by confluency at 1:52 AM on February 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


I have to say, I'm surprised by the people here who don't understand why people are frustrated by this.

First off, I don't think anyone is mad at Josh Wardel. I've seen lots of people who are sad that it's no longer independent, or mad at the consolidation of word games as part of the consolation of literally everything. I've seen people who think that Josh Wardel is a sellout, which is fair, because he is! That's fine! A million bucks is a pretty reasonable amount to sell out for! Those all strike me as reasonable reasons to be frustrated, and it's annoying to see those conflated with people being mad at the developer for getting a payday.

I'm surprised to see people saying what a nice home the NYT is for word games. I guess if you're a user of them, it's nice, but they have a very litigious history with clones / riffs of games in their portfolio. One of the things I loved about Wordle was all of the riffs on it. I'm not convinced that would have happened had it been under the NYT from the start, and I'm annoyed that this game that I love will now be owned by an organization that's in the habit of sending out threatening emails to anyone who makes things that are too similar to games that they own.

I think it's also very reasonable for people to not like the NYT as an organization, for an abundance of reasons (union-busting, "friendly-neo-nazi-next-door" stories, that Tom Cotton op-ed, etc, etc), and to feel sad that they aren't going to play it anymore, since they're not comfortable supporting the NYT.

People being sad/angry about this does not mean that they have to be mad at Josh Wardle! And in fact, it's not difficult to be happy for him and still frustrated for all of these reasons! There can be nuance!

In terms of "what other alternative is there," I don't think it is actually that hard to keep something like this running. With reasonable caching, I don't think it'd be terribly hard to get bandwidth costs down to the ~$100/month range, which isn't insignificant, but compared to the salary of a software engineer at reddit is really not much. And that's assuming it stayed at its current level of popularity, which seems unlikely. I don't blame him for not doing this — I understand that there's stress involved in running something like this beyond just the financial cost — but it frustrates me to see people claim that it's impossible for individuals to run popular websites. It's not! This stuff is not an inevitability!
Perhaps the point is just to attract people to their other games, some of which are paywalled. I have a games-only NYT subscription so that I can play the full version of the Spelling Bee -- the kind of person who likes Wordle is also likely to like the Bee and possibly the crosswords.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is exactly the point. I could definitely see a million bucks for Wordle being seen as likely to be worth it to get new Spelling Bee/crossword users. If you assume that new users that subscribe stick around for ~4 years on average, they only need 4,166 new users to make a million bucks. That seems like a reasonable number for them to be shooting for by acquiring Wordle. I doubt they'll paywall Wordle, they since they want it as a funnel for their other games. I think they'd only be likely to paywall it if it stops performing at that and they want to squeeze the last few dollars out of it.
posted by wesleyac at 2:49 AM on February 1, 2022 [13 favorites]


I'm surprised at how upset I am that people are *at all* negative about this or framing it as any even slight form of moral failing on the part of the maker.

If it helps, I'm weirdly distressed in turn at how many comments here seem to cross past "I, personally, think this is great!" to "It is morally odious to have anything slightly more complex than a positive feeling about this." By which I mean: I don't think a single comment here has expressed anything negative towards Wardle, who seems like a lovely guy (and who wrote a lovely open letter about all this, FYI). All the negative comments seem to say one of two things:
  • "It's kind of a bummer that even this, the tiniest and simplest game, turned into another case of monolithic megacorp tech acquisition, because virtually everything new in tech these days becomes the subject of territorial acquisition."
  • "It's also, semi-relatedly, a shame that the whole Internet has gotten to a point where something going viral is a source of stress, exhaustion, anxiety, and a fear about the future."
The situation with the rip-offs was totally egregious. Here's an upsetting article about one of the most blatant ones, in which the guy doing the ripping off was publicly tweeting about how crazy and exciting his journey (to make a bunch of money off of plagiarism) was. Clearly a guy who saw nothing about this but an opportunistic chance to steal a lot of money from suckers—which honestly is also how a lot of bigwigs in tech work. Can't blame the little guy for doing what Fortune 500 companies are defined by, right?

I don't think anyone here is calling Wardle that guy, or even calling the New York Times that corporation. It sounds like Wardle is happy on numerous levels with his choice, beyond even just the money, and that's great.

But on some level, it turns Wordle from "a cute, nice thing that a cute, nice person made" into "a bit of market leverage." And it's not that Wordle's not a cute nice thing etc, it's that so few things online these days feel... I think the word I want to use is cozy. Not just small, not just cute, but comforting, relaxing, peaceful, apart. It feels like the worst of the Internet is loud and oppressive and legion and hyper-connected, and Wordle was the opposite of those things—to the point that Wordle even made Twitter a slightly quieter, sweeter, more visually unusual place.

What I'm hearing from others in this thread (and what I'm feeling a bit of myself) has less to do with Wardle or the Times—I won't pretend that my "real" feelings here have anything to do with, say, the NYT's gross opinion section—than with disillusionment, with that all-too-common little depressive tug of "oh, of course this is how it really is, of course this is how it happens." Of course this cozy little thing was stressing its creator the heck out. Of course its going viral wasn't actually great for him. Of course the people really making money off of this were the scum of the earth. Of course the best possible outcome here—and this was probably the best possible outcome!—is Wordle becoming the hot new New York Times franchise. And this brief dream, whether it was nostalgia for a cozier-feeling Internet or that daily remembrance of how nice it can be to have a simple, quiet joy, now coexists with this narrative where the real takeaway is that, if you have a nice, cute idea, you might get a few million dollars for it. "The value of nice and cute is seven figures."

Again, none of this has to do with Wardle or the NYT and everything to do with context collapse. It is objectively nice that the NYT paid the guy who made this instead of just shamelessly ripping it off, which it could have. Wardle should have some money. All this is good, and I don't think anyone—even the people idly speculating whether he needed to take the money—would disagree.

I was thinking about other online happenings that made me feel this way, and the stuff I came up with was a little off-kilter. Stuff like Ze Frank becoming a vice president at Buzzfeed and releasing a public statement that his employees' off-hours video content was Buzzfeed's intellectual property, or the early giddiness of Vine turning into the weirdness of influencer houses. Or—is this weird?—when a YouTuber I like goes from releasing short, sharp videos to only putting out 4-hour "video essays." It's the same emotion that I get when I have that nightmare about Jon Bois releasing NFTs.

On some level, it is really objectively cool that Wordle might become a NYT staple and an enduring part of culture. But that other level exists, and while I would be grossed out if people were going "this objectively sucks and nobody is allowed to like it," I'm also a little discomforted that some people are reacting to the down-ish feelings that others are having by proclaiming that, basically, it is wrong to have any kind of less-than-great feeling about this. Especially when the feeling in question is more like a subtle sad tug than, you know, a fiery condemnation of any kind.

(And to tie this back to The Wirecutter, since I was the one who first mentioned it, I think that Wirecutter felt different when it was positioned against stuff like Techcrunch and Gizmodo as a kind of "you don't have to read five tech blogs daily to figure out what a nice laptop is," and when it was solely focused on that thin sliver of tech market, than after it and The Sweethome collapsed into each other, it tried covering every possible consumer market, and then its approach to reviewing became the du jour method of reviewing stuff online. That's not entirely the NY Times' fault either—though the dumb union-busting bullshit was—but the acquisition marked The Wirecutter going from a small specialized publication aimed at enthusiasts to its trying to become, as someone else mentioned, Consumer Reports, which is not something The Wirecutter was ever really good at.)
posted by rorgy at 3:18 AM on February 1, 2022 [19 favorites]


Or, on posting, everything that wesleyac just said. Whoops. 😛

(It shouldn't be news to me that MetaFilter does not, in fact, do "discussion" well and does immediately pivot towards @-style bickering about binary notion of who's "right", but somehow, 13 years on, it still feels weird that every comment thread on MeFi immediately turns into this.)
posted by rorgy at 3:21 AM on February 1, 2022 [7 favorites]


A recent episode of the Decoder Ring podcast goes into the concept of selling out:

In 2001, Oprah Winfrey invited Jonathan Franzen to come on her show to discuss his new novel The Corrections. A month later she withdrew the invitation, kicking off a media firestorm. The Oprah-Franzen Book Club Dust-Up of 2001 was a moment when two ways of thinking about selling out smashed into each other, and one of them—the one that was on its way out already— crashed and burned in public, barely to be seen again. So today on Decoder Ring, what happened to selling out?

(Not to accuse Wordle of "selling out". The podcast goes into why the concept doesn't really exist today and could have only existed in a time of economic prosperity.)
posted by AlSweigart at 4:06 AM on February 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


You have completed _ of your _ free Wordles for this month. For unlimited Wordles, subscribe to the New York Times here.
posted by acb at 4:25 AM on February 1, 2022


Indeed, you can see the code at

Spoiler warning for that link, btw, in that it contains all of the words in the order they're going to come up. (I glanced away but I still Saw Too Much.)
posted by fight or flight at 4:49 AM on February 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


Does everything need to be monetized?

No, but a lot of us need money.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 4:54 AM on February 1, 2022 [11 favorites]


AlSweigart, that podcast theme reminds me of nasreddin's best-of-MetaFilter definition of hipsters as "the point where rebels stop selling out and start buying in."

It also reminds me of a political science essay I read—but I can't remember who by—about how political victory consists, not of your side winning over your adversary's, but of your controlling the narrative so thoroughly that your adversary can only think of their argument using your terms. The way that even liberal American and British politics phrase so much in terms of "efficiency" or talk about what's "good for the market" or default to the assumption that private enterprise is better than public, in a pinch.

I was a tech enthusiast before MySpace was a thing, early enough that Facebook seemed exciting rather than oppressive, and was also on Hacker News a lot, and watched as, post-Facebook and especially post-iPhone, the tech community shifted away from open-source and interoperability towards embracing "business shark moves" as the new "tech revolution." It all feels like the same thing.

I was chatting with a friend about Wordle and he put his own like this:
– Something that resonated with me is that it was a website you went to
– And nobody's done that in forever
– And it was fucking nice to go to a fucking website
And how often do things online feel so novel and so independent that, rather than getting to them from a social media stream, you just type the URL into the bar and pop in and do the thing? That old idea of the worldwide web as something you navigate, rather than something you let passively flood you? (For some reason, the thing I keep thinking of is Homestar Runner.)

"Selling out" is a complicated idea with a lot of viewpoints, but I think that what nasreddin said back in 2010 still resonates for me today. There are many good reasons to "sell out", many great artists who enthusiastically endorse it without losing what makes them great, and many good arguments why "selling out" is not even remotely the right phrasing. But there are also reasons to feel disquiet and discontent, and I think that those reasons matter, particularly because they cut across our dominant cultural narrative, and are far easier to extinguish or dismiss. And I think it's telling that there's some pushback against even the articulation of that kind of disquiet, as if this is a debate that not only has a clear winner but whose winning voice is the only possible definition of right and just.

Anyway, this is all an overlong reaction to the fact that the comment I linked still feels extremely relevant, and its description of both "authenticity" and the critique of authenticity still feel like what we're arguing about in this thread today. Which is to say, authenticity is suspect, easy interpretations of authenticity are facile to the point of toxicity, yet at the same time there's a reason why people are drawn to think and feel those ways, and those reasons are important even if they don't yield a single simple narrative—or perhaps specifically because they don't lend themselves to easy answers.

(And now I've posted entirely too much in this thread, so now I'm gonna shoosh. Sorry, everyone, for these early-morning ramblings.)
posted by rorgy at 4:56 AM on February 1, 2022 [6 favorites]


Today's Wordle™ is brought to you by...
FEDEX
PEPSI
EXXON
INTEL
TESLA
posted by oulipian at 6:02 AM on February 1, 2022


Personally I can't help but imagine how stressful it must have been to have made a nice thing and then have it go absolutely nuts like Wordle did. If I was Josh Wardle I'd have been looking for a way out for at least a month by now. Can you imagine if it had gone offline due to him messing something up? The Internet would have caught fire.

That, and we all know none of us is going to be playing it every day in a month or so.

Ignore the money, and the monetization, and the "this is why we can't have nice things." Think about the poor guy second guessing every git commit, every click in the AWS console. Think about the poor guy fielding press enquiries every waking second of the last month, wondering how on earth he might ever get his life back.
posted by offmessage at 6:29 AM on February 1, 2022 [11 favorites]


we all know none of us is going to be playing it every day in a month or so

Some of us will be. (Got it in three this morning! I'll feel super-smart for the rest of the day! Hooray!)
posted by SPrintF at 6:45 AM on February 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


I briefly worked with the woman who is the current Editorial Director of Games at NYT. I don’t know exactly what role she played in this acquisition but it appears she’s succeeding so far and I’m glad to see it.
posted by girlmightlive at 6:54 AM on February 1, 2022 [5 favorites]


Jason Kottke is in favor of the acquisition.
posted by brainwane at 8:42 AM on February 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


people assuming this will destroy Wordle maybe are not super familiar with NYT's games section

I think rather that people who are used to navigating the NYT Games section aren't familiar with how annoying it is if you're not. Another commenter gave a link to the Spelling Bee, saying it's free: I clicked through because I have a friend who loves that game. I immediately had to click past a subscription pop-up to get to the game, then it let me put in two words before getting another pop-up asking (maybe demanding? not sure, I definitely closed the tab at that point) me to subscribe. My impression was that it's just Facebook free, contingent on signing up an account that will let you be more easily data-harvested or up-sold on paid subscription features. Wordle's fun, but it's not create-a-nyt-login fun. I am glad Wardle got paid, though.
posted by radiogreentea at 9:23 AM on February 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


Just came into say that I got today’s Wordle in 3 guesses - which almost never happens for me…..so clearly it’s going down hill already….

Wordle 227 3/6

⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
🟨🟨🟩⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
posted by inflatablekiwi at 9:25 AM on February 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


I somehow solved today's Wordle in 2 turns today, so I guess I should just retire and stop playing it now, wherever it's hosted.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:25 AM on February 1, 2022 [4 favorites]


TIL I’ve been playing in hard mode all this time without turning it on.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:44 AM on February 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


A note to consider:

I think a lot of the people grumbling about this situation may not be grumbling about Wardle "selling out" as such, but rather may be grumbling about Capitalism making it necessary for Wardle to sell out, or about Capitalism rewarding the NYT for putting Wordle behind a paywall....
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:18 AM on February 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


> Winnie the Proust: "Alternative scenarios:"

If I'm not mistaken, Scenario 1 is sort of what happened with Flappy Bird (minus losing his job).
posted by mhum at 10:29 AM on February 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


I think the best analogy for me is it's like Disney buying the Muppets in the early 2000s. An obviously good fit for both sides, guarantees some future content when that was not assured, but also a little disappointing to see the quirky underdogs rolled into the big unstoppable conglomerate.

but rather may be grumbling about Capitalism making it necessary for Wardle to sell out

Maybe the phrasing there points to the actual differing intuitions from the two strands of posters.

I kind of imagine that at 7 figures, Wardle doesn't view it a being forced to do something made necessary by Capitalism, but instead jumped at an opportunity he liked.
posted by mark k at 10:42 AM on February 1, 2022 [5 favorites]


And they already have the mini crossword and Spelling Bee for free, Wordle fits in alongside those. I'd be surprised if they started charging money for it anytime soon.

Spelling Bee isn’t free :( you get a few guesses and then they ask you to subscribe and pay for games. I’m happy for Wardle but kinda sad about this news. Ah well!
posted by sucre at 10:51 AM on February 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


A large part of the charm of Wordle for me is that it was a gift: originally from Wardle to his partner, and thence to the rest of us. And it seemed remarkable, and maybe even a little bit miraculous, that in 2022 there could be a human phenomenon that not only wasn’t obviously transactional, but seemed to resist being so: no ads, no attempts to addict you into repeat play, no requests for money or demands that you follow links to other sites—a small, good thing that was simply itself.

It’s impossible to begrudge Wardle his good fortune; as a NYT games subscriber I won’t lose out even if it does eventually become paywalled; and in the end it’s only a word game. But I’m still sad, because it’s another illustration of how determined capital is to ensure that nothing escapes its maw, how determined it is that all gifts be absorbed into the transactional economy.
posted by muhonnin at 11:15 AM on February 1, 2022 [8 favorites]


One way to monetize Wordle would be to keep the daily game free and open up archives, bonus puzzles and perhaps a six-letter version to subscribers.

I don't really care if the Times actually successful at monetizing it. I just want them to try a strategy that keeps the core game free. I just got a few relatives going on it!
posted by mark k at 11:16 AM on February 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


Mhum, yes, Flappy Bird is exactly what I was thinking of, but I couldn't remember the name. Thank you.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 11:21 AM on February 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


I've resisted playing even one game of Wordle because it's so addictive (seeing multiple posts in my Twitter feed from otherwise sane folk) and I kind of knew that big money would come along at some point and I'd resent it but dammit, I can't help but beam with pride that a local boy done good and sold his creation at exactly the right time. Good for him.

"Wardle is the youngest of three brothers. He lived in Llanddewi Rhydderch when he was a boy and the family farm cattle and sheep. They also have a lively sheepdog called Shep. The village is tranquil, with views of one of Wales’s most popular hills, Sugar Loaf, or Mynydd Pen-y-fâl. Llanddewi Rhydderch last received publicity for a curious reason when it emerged that the Pacific nation of Kiribati had an honorary consulate there."
posted by humph at 7:31 AM on February 2, 2022 [5 favorites]


re wirecutter: was always pretty terrible; exists entirely so you can avoid subscribing to consumer reports and pretend you're not your dad

Just gonna jump in and say I loved Wirecutter and have still found it frequently useful after the NYT bought it, though the budget options have definitely seemed less budgety over time. For one example, I found the bug repellent and mosquito control articles by far the most useful things I saw online when I was researching those products. The labor dispute was deeply disappointing, and I expect to find it less useful over time as the NYT beancounters continue to devalue it, but I really am surprised at the dislike of Wirecutter I'm seeing here.

Also, if we're talking about Consumer Reports, don't forget when they bought and then suddenly shuttered the extremely useful and fun Consumerist site in 2017, with no notice at all to any of the staffers. It was so unnecessary, corporate and disgusting; I've found it hard to even look at CR after that.
posted by mediareport at 7:36 AM on February 2, 2022 [3 favorites]


Does the game even permit British English spelling?

FAVOR caused quite the storm over here in the UK a few weeks ago, let me tell you
posted by altolinguistic at 9:01 AM on February 2, 2022 [6 favorites]


I've resisted playing even one game of Wordle because it's so addictive

One of the most loved qualities of Wordle is that it only displays one puzzle per day. Doing a puzzle takes a couple of minutes. You have to go out of your way to make it a time suck.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 10:34 AM on February 2, 2022 [3 favorites]


You don't have to go that far out of your way; there are lots of archive sites. I think the format of this one is better than most. The archives will probably all get cease and desists or something once NYT's version goes up.
posted by mediareport at 7:00 AM on February 3, 2022


Spelling Bee, on my mobile, didn't have any instructions (that I could find), and only let me try five words before throwing a subscription barrier in my face. Of those five, three were rejected, because when you don't know the rules you get stuff wrong (also, I guess CAVY isn't a word in US English? Live and learn). Cute design, I really like it, but not a fun or satisfying experience.

By analogy, with Wordle, they won't explain what the colours mean, and you'll only be allowed three of your six guesses without a subscription.

Happy for the creator, but I definitely have some apprehension here.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 8:08 AM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


For anyone who wants a new experience, here is a list of every single Wordle alternative, spin off, reimagining, Wordle in different languages, etc (I particularly like Lordle Of The Rings).
posted by fight or flight at 6:31 AM on February 5, 2022


As of today, you have to allow scripts from nytimes.com in order to load wordle.
posted by trig at 4:45 PM on February 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


Wordle is out here saving lives, apparently: Woman saved from hostage situation when daughter notices missed Wordle update
posted by Not A Thing at 11:45 AM on February 11, 2022


for a price “in the low seven figures,”

By the way, has the ex-president confided yet how this nominally failing newspaper has the loose cash lying around to buy a word game for millions?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:05 PM on February 11, 2022


I was boggled by that Wordle hostage article, but I'm gonna note that while everyone ends up safe in the end, it was a harrowing read.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:56 PM on February 11, 2022


Now that it's redirecting to the NYT, my Wordle screen is just blank. It was fine yesterday. It's still fine in a private browser tab, but of course I don't have any stats there. I've restarted both the iPad (an old mini 2 running 12.5.5) and Safari. I guess if I tried clearing cookies, I'd lose my stats. I do have an NYT games subscription. Any ideas?
posted by daisyace at 3:15 PM on February 12, 2022


PSA: for anyone having non stat related issues with the nyt version, the internet archive of the old wordle works, though I inagine your streak stats will be reset.
posted by juv3nal at 7:55 PM on February 12, 2022


daisyace: I see the NYT help doesn't address your question precisely. Check whether you are blocking cookies or JavaScript from the NYT website or have any other specific configurations/settings about NYT?
posted by brainwane at 8:52 PM on February 12, 2022


(Via a related front page post I'm now playing Quordle.)
posted by brainwane at 8:52 PM on February 12, 2022


daisyace: you can use this tool to migrate your statistics from old Wordle to the new NYT Wordle ("If you go clear your localstorage on nytimes" first, I think).

More from this fediverse thread:
Pretty neat trick Wordle used to migrate everyone's saved game state:

The main Wordle site was replaced with a bit of JS that grabs the game data from LocalStorage and puts it in the query string when redirecting to nytimes.

Also notable: that code is vanilla JS, no libraries!
Wardle was evidently on the Syntax podcast recently to discuss: "What's the tech stack for Wordle? Does he care about the clones of Wordle? And how did selling Wordle work?"
posted by brainwane at 9:33 PM on February 12, 2022


With the changeover, not only has Wordle lost my stats, but it now seems to be resetting them every day.
posted by JHarris at 12:24 AM on February 13, 2022


Troubleshooting on my own didn't work, even with the helpful suggestions here. But I wrote to the NYT help email (nytgames@nytimes.com), and a human got back to me with a reset link that did end up working. It didn't work for me immediately. I hard-quit Safari and hard-shut-down the iPad. When I restarted and used that link, it wasn't blank anymore, but my stats were still gone. I then played today's Wordle and all my stats came back, hooray!
posted by daisyace at 9:45 AM on February 13, 2022


Oh hey! Open Source Wordle that runs on Ubuntu Touch!
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:43 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


(My stats were not lost, so yay for me.)
posted by Going To Maine at 2:17 PM on February 13, 2022


Anecdotally, two different couples I know got two different words today, with the same puzzle number. They compared notes, as usual, and discovered that they were working on different words.

So maybe the common word feature is gone? Which would be a shame -- that was a big part of the community aspect of it.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:39 AM on February 15, 2022


Some home testing, and it might be just a glitch.
posted by Capt. Renault at 7:13 AM on February 15, 2022


NYT Wordle has diverged slightly from Original Flavor Wordle. NYT removed a few words from the dictionary and the difference showed up in solutions today. Full spoilery explanation.
posted by Nelson at 8:07 AM on February 15, 2022 [5 favorites]


Ah! Thank you!

I appear to be using Original Wordle still, in a tab on my phone. I was quite surprised by today's word, and was expecting to see people flummoxed by it, but nobody on the Wordle Slack channel at work reacted at all... which, checking in again just now, turns out to be because they all got the NYT word.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 10:53 AM on February 15, 2022


Wordle *still* resets my stats every day. Argh.
posted by JHarris at 2:46 AM on February 16, 2022


The UK gets its revenge in today's Wordle ;)
posted by altolinguistic at 1:40 AM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]


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