In early 2014, Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen took down “Flappy Bird” from app stores because the most popular mobile game of that time had become too hot to handle. Claiming that he “could not take this any more” and it had “ruined [his] simple life”, Dong let go of 50 million Android downloads and advertisement revenue of $50,000 a day. Eight years later, Josh Wardle had a markedly different fate in store.
Wordle, his popular word game, is now owned by The New York Times, earning him an undisclosed seven-figure sum. Unlike Flappy Bird, we don’t know its user-count, and the game had no ad revenue to lure the world’s most famous newspaper. Yet, Wardle’s game ticked all the right boxes as a business proposition, lifting all the pleasures of classic physical puzzles into your web browser.
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Is Wordle the best word game ever and the worthiest successor of Scrabble and Crossword? Publishers and scholars see Wordle’s virality in the unique pandemic context. Crosswords, which were invented in 1913, entered NYT only in 1942 as “a diversion from the tough news” during World War II, NYT communications director Jordan Cohen told Mint. “Today we face a similar difficult world and our games provide that diversion again—that sense that you might not be able to solve all the world’s problems, but for ten minutes to an hour you can solve this, find something humorous, and maybe even a connection with others you might not otherwise have,” Cohen added, calling Wordle “a delightful and wildly popular game”.
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Viral response
Some see the Wordle addiction dying down as the world gets normal, but the NYT’s high-value acquisition shows those in the business are upbeat. Shannon DeVito, director of books at US bookseller Barnes & Noble, said sales of crosswords and physical puzzles in general had boomed during the pandemic as customers gravitated towards at-home activities. Such activities took young people “away from the hustle of daily life”, she said, reckoning the trend was here to stay.
Indeed, Wordle’s swift rise sets it apart from all the best puzzles past and present. On Google, searches for “word games” used to be popular for years, but Wordle has now garnered eight times the peak volumes reached by “word games”—and that is nearly as much as the searches for Netflix and Yahoo and more than covid-19. Robert Lesser, a US-based software engineer, estimates that by 5 March, Wordle-related tweets numbered nearly 15 million and the game was played 229 million times.
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World of Wordles
“Wordle’s popularity is partly to do with this moment in history,” said Erin Sebo, head of English at Flinders University, Adelaide, who has written a book about medieval riddles. “The internet means writing is an increasingly important part of people’s work and social lives, so it’s not surprising that we’re fascinated by a new word game.”
Perhaps this is why Wordle has quickly transcended the barriers of language. As of 22 March, fans have created 691 Wordle versions in at least 140 languages, including Marathi, Tamil and Hindi, data compiled by Júda Ronén shows. There are also popular versions based on arithmetic and recognizing flags and country maps. These versions guard Wordle against its biggest drawback: unlike the unlimited hits you can take at crosswords, Scrabble and sudokus, Wordle’s stock of five-letter words will die out one day. But thanks to these spin-offs across forms and geographies, the game could stay on for years to come.
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What’s in a game?
Most clones uphold Wordle’s basic USPs: unlike most things online that encourage “binge behaviour”, it comes only once a day, with the same puzzle for all, Sebo said. “Wordle’s simplicity is part of its appeal,” said Penny Paxman of University of Calgary, who has studied Scrabble’s impact on the human brain. “It’s easy to start playing, and doesn’t take up much time.”
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Nostalgic Americans find parallels to the 1980s TV show Lingo and an even older game, Jotto. Yet, NYT catching the Wordle bus makes perfect business sense. Its games section alone has over a million subscribers, and its puzzles were played over 500 million times last year. Wordle was an obvious fit.
New-age games need hits and revenue to stay famous, but Wordle goes by the old rules. Though still well-loved, crosswords and sudokus no longer get tweets. For Wordle, expect “the initial craze” to pass, but it could well become a “permanent feature like crosswords”, Sebo said.
