Over the past month a browser game called Wordle has skyrocketed in popularity. This is a game where you have six attempts to guess a word. Every guess you make you get to see how many letters from the word you guessed are in the word of the day, and you keep going until you figure out what the word is. In early January I started hearing about Wordle, but I didn’t know what it was. Naturally I looked it up, and then started playing every day. I would wake up, check my phone, then open Safari to play Wordle. This was until a January 31st when the New York Times announced they had purchased wordle for over a million dollars. This made me worried. The New York Times runs on a subscription basis, so this means that Wordle would probably go on to be behind a paywall. This was confirmed in the article the New York Times put out. The New York Times said, “the game would initially remain free to new and existing customers.” This means that eventually the game would go behind a paywall, and I think this is a bad move.
This isn’t a bad move for the person who created Wordle, or the New York Times. This is a bad decision for me. I want to be able to play Wordle without having to pay for it and I don’t want to deal with ads. There is already knockoff version of wordle, but I’m sure all of them have ads that you have to pay to get rid of. I also don’t want to pay to access Wordle. I enjoy the free nature of it because it means anyone with an internet connection can play. People post their Wordle boards on twitter, and for the first time in a long time it feels like people are untied around one thing.
I’m not the first person to make this connection, I’ve seen it on twitter a few times, but this really does feel like John Krasinski selling his show “Some Good News.” It is something that everyone can get behind that is sold to a large company who will just use it to make profits, and when it stops doing that, they throw it away.
I don’t blame the person who created Wordle for selling it. He is one guy who decided to make a game for his Wife who loves word games, and now he is a millionaire. He did what was best for him, and you can’t really blame him for that. I more so blame the New York Times, and what their inevitable decision to put Wordle behind a paywall.
Mark Warren can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @MarkWarren1832
Jaxx
John Krasinski didn’t follow through with the sale of Some Good News. It’s still his property, I’m guessing he just doesn’t have any time to do anything with it anymore. Funny enough, it was the NYT that reported that. The show raised over $10 million for charities though, so not for nothing.