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Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

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Re: Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

#141

Post by capeterson »

queuebert wrote: post #132
msoad wrote: post #16

They paid the money to own it. I am not mad about it. You can literally save the HTML and play it if you really care not to see NYT logo. This is a good story for an indie game to be honest

Surely the creator could have made more money by serving ads or something. I doubt the NYT paid them the full lifetime value of the site. And anyway, isn't the NYT supposed to be reporting news or something? Since when has the most prestigious newspaper become a hub for fooling around?

I'm sure it likely sold for enough that the owners can retire early and wealthy. Maybe they'd get more money serving ads, or maybe it's a fad and it dies out in a month or two. I'd rather just take the payout and move onto other personal projects, given that Wordle is pretty much complete.

Re: Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

#142

Post by stevewodil »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #134
DecoPerson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FIBRE is spelt FIBER in American English. AGORA is a rarely-used word and is probably not in the dictionary referenced by The NY Times for their word puzzles. PUPAL may be mis-perceived as a misspelling of PUPIL and frustrate players. I don’t know… I’m guessing!

Well they had "humor" and that's an actual misspelling :D

Not in American English. That's spelled correctly.

Re: Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

#143

Post by spoonjim »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #48

They've also removed the following from the list of words in future games wench, slave, fibre, agora, pupal, lynch And removed the following from the list of words that are accepted as guesses (in addition to the above ones): gooks, darky, pussy, spick, spics, bitch, fagot, dyked, coons, spiks, sluts, dykey, faggy, homos, chink, dykes, lesbo, kikes, whore Most of those I get, but why did fibre, agora, and pupal get p…

I’ve always found that the Wordle solution word is very common. So agora and pupal would be surprising in that regard.

Re: Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

#144

Post by TingPing »

HmOh6WbJ wrote: post #123
alex-chew wrote: post #106

I've been working on a clean-room reimplementation that uses the original word list and is visually similar to the original, but also allows for playing unlimited puzzles each day: https://wrd.li (The order of the solutions is different than the original, and is randomized each day.)

Honest q: could you get sued for that? Likely at least a cease and desist, right?

Sure you always can. Will it be ruled against them? Its a pretty trivial and not unique site/game.

Re: Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

#145

Post by motoxpro »

queuebert wrote: post #132
msoad wrote: post #16

They paid the money to own it. I am not mad about it. You can literally save the HTML and play it if you really care not to see NYT logo. This is a good story for an indie game to be honest

Surely the creator could have made more money by serving ads or something. I doubt the NYT paid them the full lifetime value of the site. And anyway, isn't the NYT supposed to be reporting news or something? Since when has the most prestigious newspaper become a hub for fooling around?

What the heck? You want the guy to run ads on the site because you don't like the NYT? Thank god he didn't do that. What was the lifetime value in your eyes? Adding popups and paywalls like many other online games? He made > $1 million dollars.

Re: Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

#146

Post by nefitty »

gnicholas wrote: post #117
shbooms wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's presumably little/no acquisition value in the eyes of the NYT without this tracking. I pay their $4.99/month subscription for access to their "Games" package solely because it includes access to their full archive of daily crosswords (going back to 1993). If they add a similar "archive" of the daily Wordles and allow payed users to replay past puzzles, that could presumably provide new value to them by enti…

FYI, there's already an archive that's free to use. [1] Although it shows basic stats, I was surprised that it doesn't show stats on how many guesses you took. 1: https://metzger.media/games/wordle-archive

Thanks. This is the first time I've tried it. I have no idea what the rules are. Oh well.

Re: Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

#147

Post by ece »

not2b wrote: post #119
ece wrote: post #90

Saw this before 4pm today and entered the word I solved at 4:30pm yesterday. Solved in 1. :)

Not sure why people are bragging about that (this is the second such comment I saw). You could already solve in on the desktop and then "solve in 1" on your phone, of course.

It transferred over my history just fine for the month or so I've been playing. I only have Firefox Focus on my phone, which is like permanent incognito mode.

Re: Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

#148

Post by leros »

blunte wrote: post #69

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 h…

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.

Re: Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

#149

Post by acdha »

leros wrote: post #148
blunte wrote: post #69

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 h…

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.…

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?”)

Re: Wordle Now Redirects to NYT

#150

Post by bee_rider »

capeterson wrote: post #139
bee_rider wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see the motivation for removing slurs, etc, from the available guess list in a game where you are the only one who sees your guesses. Good of them to take the words with unpleasant associations out of the solutions list, though.

A lot of this game is yet to be solved- it would be rather unfortunate if one of the most useful words in a top strategy happened to be a slur, meaning that those wishing to "solve" the game would likely have to include said slur in their strategy. Otherwise, yes, it should rarely be an issue.

I guess that is possible.

None of them look great, intuitively. Actually it is kind of interesting, although unsurprising on second thought, that the removed words skew toward these harsh g and k noises which don't show up as much elsewhere in English. So they don't look like good first picks. But maybe at some point strategies will advance to having common second picks or something like that.

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