from Hacker News

The Death of Wordle

by 333c on 2/1/22, 1:22 AM with 42 comments

• by returningfory2 on 2/1/22, 3:13 AM

  > But I resent that we live in a system where any independent creativity is exploited for financial gain.

  So what's the alternative system? One in which creators of delightful projects like Wordle are prevented somehow from making money from their creations? That seems weird and bad.

• by noah_buddy on 2/1/22, 3:23 AM

  The reports of WORDLE's death are greatly exaggerated. Whatever, NYT bought a game. Who was going to still be playing in a year? Who was going to be playing till it was done with the scheduled run? I promise you it's increasingly small fractions of the current player base in the hypothetical no sale world. Change is as constant as the sea, the magic would've died out in a few months regardless. Rehost/stop playing/move on.

• by tony-allan on 2/1/22, 1:58 AM

  The current Wordle will live on in 1000 private copies. It's self-contained in a HTML and a JS file with no server requirement other that file hosting.

• by dataangel on 2/1/22, 3:35 AM

  Oh no! How dare the author of something that millions of people have enjoyed earn one penny from his work! And it's definitely dead now that it might only be available to one of the most successful publications on the planet! /s

• by jamesgreenleaf on 2/1/22, 3:30 AM

  > This is not to say that I have any animosity towards the game’s creator. Given such a large price tag, it’s hard to imagine not accepting a buyout offer. But I resent that we live in a system where any independent creativity is exploited for financial gain.

  That's sort of the trade, isn't it? If independent creativity is regularly exploited for profit, that means people are always incentivized to create more. Would they really create as much in a system that offered few or no incentives?

• by imgabe on 2/1/22, 3:29 AM

  I've been playing Wordle religiously for the past 21 days and I'm nothing but happy that the creator was able to get a life-changing amount of money for this very fun game that he generously shared with the world for free.

  Extrapolating this to "all creativity is exploited for financial gain" is silly. There are millions of websites full of independent creativity that are not being exploited for financial gain, mostly because there's no opportunity to do so.

  This vision of a world where artists work only for the pure love of making art without considerations of money doesn't exist. It never existed. Artists gotta eat too.

  And let's get real for a moment here. It's not War and Peace or Beethoven's 5th Symphony or something. It's a very slick version of hangman with an extremely clever virality mechanism. If it goes behind a paywall it will be a mild annoyance at best before people move on to something else. It's probably going to die down anyway as the fad passes.

• by madarco on 2/1/22, 8:43 PM

  NYT bought the NFT of Wordle!

  This acquisition will forever be remembered as the best example of how NFTs work.

  They didn't buy the copyright, the source code or any assets, but the de-facto distributed knowledge that they acquired the right to be considered the Wordle Owners.