The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) said in a statement Monday it has acquired the popular word-guessing game Wordle for an undisclosed amount “in the low seven figures.”
What Happened: The newspaper said the five-letter, addictive word game quickly grabbed attention and drew millions of daily users from all over the world after it was opened to the public in November.
Wordle will now join NYT’s portfolio of games including The Crossword, Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed and a few others, which the media company says were played more than 500 million times last year.
The daily word game was created and named so by Josh Wardle, as a play on the creator’s last name and it being a word game. The Brooklyn-based software engineer created a similar prototype back in 2013 but scrapped the idea after his friends were unimpressed.
“The game has gotten bigger than I ever imagined,” Wardle wrote in a post on the microblogging website Twitter.
An update on Wordle pic.twitter.com/TmHd0AIRLX
— Josh Wardle (@powerlanguish) January 31, 2022
Wardle created the game for his partner Palak Shah, who loves games, and to kill time during the COVID-19 pandemic.
See Also: What Is Wordle? How To Play The Hottest New Free Puzzle Game Everyone Is Talking About
What’s In A Game: The daily word game allows players six chances to guess a five-letter word. As per NYT, Wordle had 300,000 users by the middle of this month and now millions play the game daily.
The game will be initially free-to-play for existing and new users when it moves to NYT.
The newspaper charges for a subscription and most of its content has gone behind a paywall since 2011. Wordle fits well into NYT’s strategy to increase digital subscriptions to 10 million by 2025, the publication said.
Several times Wordle and a puzzle number have trended on Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) and searches on Alphabet Inc's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google have outpaced those of several popular video games.
The game has also seen celebrities sharing their scores on social media sites.
Photo: Screenshot of Wordle
