Why the Wordle Acquisition is Great News for the Web
Being the maker of Progressier, I felt like I absolutely had to write about Wordle. This little web-based game has received a disproportionate amount of attention from the media in the past 30 days — like no other web app ever before, really.
Between Wordle going viral, unscrupulous developers shamelessly banking on the idea, Twitter bots spoiling the game, app stores banning the copycats, and countless alternatives appearing left and right, there’s no way you haven’t heard of it by now.
Today, in an unexpected turn of events, The New York Times announced they acquired Wordle for a price in the “low seven figures”.
So how did this simple word game become such a phenomenon? Why did The New York Times buy it? And what does the acquisition mean for the game and the future of the web?
Less is more
If Wordle is so popular, it’s first and foremost because it’s a great game. In 2022, making a game with such simple mechanics so compelling is no easy feat. Simple is hard.
Most games are about getting you hooked. The longer you play, the more ads you see — or the more in-app purchases you make. With Wordle, you‘ll only play for about 5 to 10 minutes a day. Once you’ve guessed the word, you’re done for the day. Beautiful.
Scarcity creates anticipation. Anticipation creates fun. Whether this was a deliberate choice or a happy accident, Wordle owes a lot of its success to its screen-time-limiting mechanics. Anecdotally, I tried playing clones that offer unlimited plays — they’re arguably a lot less fun than the original.
Built-in virality
With Wordle, everyone plays the same word at the same time. This is great because it turns an otherwise solo game into a shareable play-it-together experience. And social media surely loves that.
And oh, did Josh Wardle really know how to harness the power of social media. Not really surprising if you consider that he used to work at Reddit, and previously created The Button in 2015 and Place in 2017, two other online experiments with built-in virality.
These cryptic tweets have surely helped make Wordle popular
Let’s just take a moment to appreciate how brilliant these cryptic tweets are. They’re enigmatic enough to make you wonder what the heck is happening when seeing all your friends share them. Yet they’re not so revealing that they’ll spoil the fun for everyone else. Simply brilliant.
When the web is done right
Wordle is also the perfect example of what the web can offer when done right: no download, no ads, no tracking, a simple interface, a native app feel, and an app that works on every browser and device.
Wordle animations are simple but to the point. They make you forget the whole thing is actually a website — not a native app.
It also has a very low carbon footprint. Look at the size of the app’s network requests below. The whole game weighs practically nothing. In a world where 94% of websites include third-party libraries, this is refreshing.
Wordle is an HTML file, a logo, two small JavaScript files, and Google Analytics, weighting less than 150Kb total.
I’ve seen people comment that Josh Wardle was selling the game because he couldn’t manage its traffic. Sorry, but I don’t think this is what’s happening at all. As is, hosting the whole app with its hundreds of thousands (millions?) of daily users probably costs less than $100/month.
Everything is happening in the browser. This can scale indefinitely without much work.
But let’s imagine for a moment that he had instead decided to store the word list in a database rather than hard-code it in his client-side code.
Then, every single time someone would enter a word, the app would have needed to call its server to verify it. This would have meant hundreds of API calls per user per month. This can get expensive quite quickly with AWS or GCP.
Right now, after the game is downloaded once, the browser will cache the JavaScript files. In subsequent plays, it essentially costs the developer $0.
Anyone familiar with web development knows that you don’t store anything important in the browser. Security through obscurity doesn’t work. But given that it was just a simple game with small stakes and small ambitions, this was probably the right call. And this wouldn’t have prevented the bots from spoiling the fun anyway — they would have just found a way to ruin today’s word instead of tomorrow’s.
So, what’s next for Wordle?
First, I’m afraid that the very reasons that made Wordle popular (no ads, no tracking, no in-app purchases, play only once a day) might get lost in this acquisition. Although The New York Times mentioned keeping the game initially free to play, it definitely won’t stay that way forever.
Wordle will eventually be included in The New York Times Game Subscription — they’re obviously betting that the addition of Wordle will increase their MRR. The New York Times had revenues of $1.9 billion in 2019, so whether this acquisition achieves this goal or not, the “low seven-figure price” keeps it a small bet with small risks. No biggie.
Also, congrats to Josh Wardle for selling his game! Although I don’t think managing it as-is was particularly monetarily overwhelming, monetizing it in the future would have probably proven difficult. People play it because it’s free and fun. Remove “free” from the equation and you probably remove the “fun” as well.
In that regard, I think The New York Times was the best home for the game. They know how to monetize games without plastering them with ads. While they haven’t mentioned exactly what the acquisition entails for the game, it’s fair to expect that they’ll release a whole bunch of new features soon.
It’s likely you’ll still be able to play the game as-is for as long as you like. But new future features will be part of their subscription plan. Here are some of paid features I predict will appear soon:
- Play with four-, six- or seven-letter words
- Play all past Wordles
- Multiplayer mode
I’m also curious to see how they’ll manage the transition — particularly how they’ll allow users to retain their streak and stats, another important component of the appeal of Wordle.
As is, it’s all stored in the browser localStorage. Everything in there is tied to a particular domain. So there’s no way to automatically move user settings — and user streaks — from powerlanguage.co.uk to whatever-domain-nyt-will-be-using.com.
They’ll have to create user profiles with these client settings in a database next time users visit powerlanguage.co.uk, return a user ID to the browser, and from that point on, save all streaks and settings server-side against that user ID instead of locally. And at some point, that same database will be used by the New York Times domain.
The New York Times will improve the game
I think there’s a good chance The New York Times will genuinely take the game to the next level — improving on everything that wasn’t done quite right.
First off, Wordle definitely deserves its own domain.
Fun fact, wordle.com is currently for sale on GoDaddy. If you feel like making a quick buck, buy it and sell it back to the New York Times in a few weeks.
In my opinion, Wordle deserves the designation of “Progressive Web App”. But from a technical perspective, it’s not. It doesn’t have a service worker. With a service worker, it would have been trivial to make the game playable offline completely. And it also would have been installable on desktop.
It’s great that reporters write articles explaining the add-to-home-screen functionality. But it wouldn’t have been necessary if the developer had bothered actually promoting that option within the app. Hopefully, The New York Times will correct that!
Google and Apple have conditioned us to believe that apps must be downloaded from app stores or otherwise they’re “not real apps”. The truth is that websites can be apps. Wordle is for all intents and purposes, a real app.
And in 2022, this app format can be installed on one’s device — just like any other app. In fact, you could even argue that PWAs are better since they can be installed on Mac OS, Windows, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS. Universal availability — isn’t it great?
Despite running a company called Progressier, I’ve always disliked the “PWA” acronym. I wish we would rename this app format “Universal Apps” or some other term that highlights their advantages. The more-obscure “progressive” term really only speaks of its technical aspects — i.e. the idea that you can progressively enhance your web app with features, rather than add them all at once. Not very good marketing at all IMHO.
But… the makers of your app stores are also the makers of your browsers. So there’s little incentive for them to promote universal apps. Although — to its credit — Google does push the concept more than one could legitimately expect them to. Kudos to them for that.
Finally, kudos to Josh Wardle for helping democratize the web as a viable medium for hosting apps. Wordle is the perfect proof that a great product — especially one with built-in virality — can be loved by users regardless of its form factor or provenance.
If a 2-month old project hosted on a subdirectory of a domain as unattractive as powerlanguage.co.uk can lead to a million-dollar payout, then you got a good reason to skip uploading your app to Google Play and the App Store. And instead, simply focus your attention on building a great product.
Web3/NTF/Metaverse/{insert buzzword of the day} — the web is filled with instances of style over substance.
Let’s just appreciate that, for once, the substance has triumphed.
More content at plainenglish.io. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Get exclusive access to writing opportunities and advice in our community Discord.
