Game Wordle Acquired by the New York Times

 The hottest game these days, on Facebook or Twitter, you'll occasionally see people sharing rows of squares of green, gray and yellow tiles.

There is no information other than the name 'Wordle' and a squishy number like 5/6.

There isn't even a link to the website. Still, the number of people sharing this seems to keep increasing.

This is a post where people shared the results of an online word guessing game called 'Wordle'.

Wardle is a game of guessing what a randomly selected five-letter English word will be.

Chances are six. Enter a word in the 5 blanks
1) If the letter is included in the word and the position is correct, it is green,
2) If a letter is included in a word but the position is incorrect, yellow,
3) If there is no letter in the word, the color of the cell changes to gray

It's a simple game, but it's strangely tense and addictive. The element of luck, which depends on probability, and the element of skill, such as English vocabulary, are exquisitely blended.

There were several games of the principle of finding answers using hints given in limited conditions, and they were well applied to guessing words.

Only one question is asked per day.

After playing the game once, you have to wait for the day to change.

When the game is over, a dialog box will appear where you can share your game results with statistics about your play.

The correct answer is not shared, only how many times it was solved or failed is displayed as a combination of tiles.

This game was created by Josh Wardle, who worked as a software engineer on Reddit and now works for a design firm MSCHF, for his girlfriend who likes word puzzles.

There is no app, only the webpage is playable.

It first appeared in October of last year as an extremely private game played only with family and friends.

It was a game played by about 90 people. However, it started going viral, and was introduced in the New York Times, and in December, the number of users increased to 300,000. Now it has grown to millions of users.

Similar fake games have been pouring in, and there are even people who mathematically analyze which words or letters should be used to increase the probability of success.

Fans share a common appreciation for Wardle as a simple yet clever game, and an opportunity to communicate and get closer with family and friends.

It makes common topics easier in that everyone guesses one word.

And not too long ago, the New York Times announced that it was acquiring Waddle.

The New York Times is likely to use Wardle for puzzle subscriptions such as

crosswords and guessing spells.

The acquisition price was only known as a 'seven-digit number', i.e. as low as $1 million.

Wardle's Success Factors

Wardle's sudden popularity and acquisition story reminds us of the early successes of smartphones and mobile apps in the early 2010s.

At that time, as the mobile app ecosystem grew in earnest, one person or a small development team created a game or app that was simple but had core fun elements or functions, went viral on social media, became popular, was acquired by a large company, or It has often grown into a solid company. These games represent a new formula for success in the mobile and social media era.

It can be summed up as: It's okay to be a small creative team, not a large organization, and it just needs to be able to deliver core value easily, even if it's not a high-quality, complex, sophisticated product.

In addition, we had to target a new user behavior pattern suitable for a mobile environment using a smartphone rather than an office environment using a PC.

Wardle can only be played once per day, and you will have to visit the game page again the next day to play again.

The game is meaningless if the correct answer appears in the shared results, as wardles are given equal to one problem per day for everyone.

The tile-only sharing method was novel enough to spark curiosity about the game without revealing the answer.

It's similar to how affectionate fans create their own ways to compensate for the lack of a service they love, and the developer embraces it.

In other words, Wardle has everything you need to be successful in mobile and social media, and you can say it's 'in a good way' (?).

It was the game's goal to get users to spend as much time in the game as possible, wasting their time, money and attention.

And the techniques for achieving this goal are now so highly developed and the know-how well-known.

Therefore, it has been a while since the market was reorganized around familiar games rather than novel games, complex games rather than simple games, and large companies that can put a lot of resources rather than small teams.

But in Wardle there is no such thing as a way to circumvent the restrictions of play.

There is no sub-pay model that allows you to play the next game faster, and sharing your game results with a friend doesn't give you a bonus for playing another game.

It is designed to spend only 5 minutes a day. It's possible because it was originally made only for girlfriends and a few acquaintances without any intention of making money, but the rapid popularity of these games shows that the public's demand for 'not tired' games is still there.

The acquisition of Wardle by the New York Times should be regarded as a very rare and difficult-to-generalize case, but at least it will be an interesting case from the creator's economy point of view, in that there were cases where creators who did not aim for intentional monetization were rewarded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnWPXZ6vQB8

Waddle said in an interview with American online media Slate:

"I also worked in Silicon Valley, so I know the techniques for game companies to get people's attention as much as possible, make them play endlessly, send push notifications, register personal information, etc."

"I want to do the opposite philosophically. So it seems that a game that can be enjoyed simply and humanely has come out. People who are accustomed to advertising and monetization have sympathized with this aspect of this game in the context of Corona 19. same"

Other than that, Wardle caused a lot of buzz.

With the popularity of Wardle, of course, several fake games were poured out.

In particular, since Wardle does not have a mobile app (although you can enjoy it comfortably on the mobile web), there were many similar apps that aimed at that gap.

Some came out for a fee, and some were even priced at $30.

As usual, the interest in Wardle was so great that negative public opinion against these counterfeiters arose.

In the past, Apple, which had not taken any action against similar games that have been swept by the reputation of popular games, has unusually removed the fake Wardle games from the App Store this time.

With this incident as an opportunity, criticism arose that Apple and Google were putting their hands on the company's interests even though they could manage problematic apps such as explicit copy apps.

Wardle was eventually acquired by The New York Times.

The New York Times recently announced that it had surpassed 10 million subscribers three years earlier than its original goal.

The strong popularity of its own news subscription products and the user base of the recently acquired subscription-based sports media 'The Athletic' played a major role in this.

However, other subscription products, such as Puzzle and Cooking, are also contributing to the New York Times' subscriber growth and business diversification.

Puzzles are one of The New York Times' core content

The first crossword puzzle to appear in the New York Times dates back to February 1942.

Currently, the New York Times operates puzzle subscription services such as crossword puzzles and spellings as separate products from the news.

Among the 375,000 new subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2021, there are over 200,000 subscribers in non-news fields such as puzzles, cooking and wire cutters (product reviews)

Wardle is expected to serve as a channel to diversify the New York Times' subscription products such as puzzles and to attract consumers.

For now, we plan to maintain the free policy, but we cannot rule out the possibility that it will be paid in the future or included in existing subscription products.

Unexpected success stories on the Internet are always exciting.

Wardle seems to be more interesting in that he wrote an old-fashioned success story that is hard to find now, and is now in the middle of the hot digital subscription economy.