Because of the need to stay at home for a long time during the epidemic, in order to spend time with his girlfriend, Josh Wardle, a software engineer who worked at the American forum Reddit, developed a word guessing game on the web - Wordle.
Its pages and rules are simple, players can guess a five-letter word in Wordle every day, there are six opportunities to enter a word, green means that the correct letter is in this position, yellow grid indicates that the word contains the letter, but not this position, and gray grid means that the word does not contain this letter.
Image credit: New York Times
There are only six chances a day to challenge, not addictive, and play without restraint. After completing the day's challenge, you can also share the results on social networking sites (the pages you share only display the color of the patch), and it has become a social way to enhance communication with friends and family, plus simple pages and rules, making it a popular "hit" that attracts millions of players in less than four months.
Image credit: Twitter
In early February 2022, The New York Times announced that it had bought Wordle, not revealing much details about the purchase, but reported that the transaction had reached a million dollars.
Image courtesy of People
As a subscription-based medium, many players had many concerns after the New York Times bought Wordle, such as whether it would turn into a pay game. Although the New York Times later said the game would always be free, players were worried about it.
Before being bought by The New York Times, Wordle was a free ad-free web crossword puzzle, but not long ago some code-savvy Wordler discovered that there were many ad trackers on the site. Some of these trackers come from The New York Times, and much of the data is sent to third parties like Google.
Josh Wardle didn't want the game to be addictive or controlled by advertising or data collection companies when developing Wordle, so the rules and interface were concise. As a result, Wordle, which was bought by the New York Times, is now also "falling" in the ad tracking, causing dissatisfaction among many players.
Not only advertising, but also many Wordler posts on social media before saying that they felt that the words that Wordle had to guess every day after being bought by the New York Times were too strange, and questioned that the New York Times increased the difficulty of the game and affected the player's experience.
In response to players' doubts about the difficulty of the game, The New York Times said that it only excluded some difficult words and potentially controversial words, and did not make changes to Wordle's gameplay.
As an established media outlet, The New York Times bought Wordle at a high price, probably because it wanted to expand its game subscription segment. In addition to news reports, The New York Times' second-largest subscription business is Times Games, which includes many anagram games.
Image courtesy of The Conversation
For The New York Times, the Wordle of "bring your own traffic" is naturally very attractive, but how to maintain the freshness of the game and how to seek new developments are also difficult and challenging.
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