Wordle’s acquisition | Free doesn’t stand a chance anymore

I remember the good old days when the internet was new and growing. It was a place where many creative people were trying out new things. The internet was solely used to do new things and try out different stuff. Then slowly it became a business and then a full-fledged stand-alone company.

When I recently heard of an amazing and yet very simple game Wordle, I was both happy and surprised. It did not have any ads, no cookies were requested and no permission of any sort. A simple daily word guessing game for everyone. People quickly became a part of a community as the words were the same of the entire world. everyone had 5 shots at guessing a word.

But recently, the word-guessing game that I’ve been playing, has been acquired by The New York Times Company. The price? A low seven-figure sum. Which is kinda amazing, granted it was just one guy who wrote the entire code and handled the website. An impressive amount for what is essentially a simple website based on a single javascript file — seriously, this is the entire game right here.

Now, I understand that NYT didn’t pay for the file itself, or (let’s be honest), the unoriginal idea of word guessing. What they bought was the trend, or better yet, a phenomenon. Millions of people are playing the game every day across the world, and the company that makes the most famous crossword puzzle certainly wants to be involved with this new word game craze.

None of us could fault Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle, for profiting from his game’s overnight success and, in his words, feeling “overwhelmed” by all of it. Josh did what any of us would in his situation. But the acquisition itself is leaving many of the game’s fans feeling quite sad. A quick turnaround like this is further proof that we’ve built a world where a big corporation can immediately swoop in and take control of any naturally-good thing for a profit.

NYT has given confidence to all the new or existing players that the game will remain free to play. But to be honest, I’m very sceptical about it. Wordle is nice for a very basic and simple reason. It’s a website and not some application. So he didn’t have to pay any % to any store. There are no ads or tracking. Not an app that keeps pinging you with a thousand notifications every minute, no floating videos, with no cookie pop-ups, and none of the annoyances of the modern web – do those even exist anymore?

A gaming landscape filled with graphic-intense titles built on addictive tactics and deceptive currency purchases, Wordle kept it simple. One word per day, every day, for everyone, for free.

The message here is simple, “As long as there is some money to be made, we can’t have nice simple things.“

Wordle is just nice. Nice like the good ol’ times, when the web was more about sharing information and experiences and less about businesses making billions of dollars in profits. If Wordle was a person, it would be that stranger standing with a “Free Hugs” sign who is just trying to remind us that the best things are the simplest ones.

In its extremely short existence and because of its immediate success, Wordle spanned copycats that wanted to leech off its success, many language variants — Le Mot, Wordle ES, AlWird, Termo, to name a few — and was finally acquired for a million (or more).

After this buyout, I am further convinced that nothing good can outlast the greed of big corporations. As long as there is some money to be made, we can’t have nice, simple things.