Wordle: purchase made NYT triple players from other games – 03/24/2023 – Market

Even though it’s a free title, “Wordle” helped The New York Times catapult its paid gaming platform.

Just over a year after buying the game from its creator Josh Wardle for a few million dollars –the exact amount was not revealed–, the American newspaper saw the number of daily users of its other games triple, even with a reduction in the number of viral title players.

“Buying Wordle has fundamentally changed our business. There are a lot more people who know about The New York Times games now,” said Zoe Bell, the paper’s executive games producer.

Despite its success, the newspaper’s move was not fully thought through and relied on a bit of opportunism and luck.

“Our plan was for 2022 to be the year of the ‘Spelling Bee’ [jogo de palavras desenvolvido pelo próprio NYT]”, Bell said during a keynote this Thursday (23) at the GDC (Game Developers Conference), in San Francisco. “If you asked us in November 2021 if we would buy a game in 2022, I would say ‘definitely not . It’s not in our plans’. But if there’s a viral hit in your genre that you can buy, that changes everything.”

According to the producer, only three days separate the first article published by the newspaper about the game, published on January 3, 2022, and the first NYT contact with Wardle about the interest in acquiring the game. Less than 30 days later, on January 31, it was announced that the deal was closed.

Despite all this agility, Bell didn’t have much time to incorporate “Wordle” into the newspaper’s platform. With 14 years of experience in the games business, working primarily in free game development and publishing, she knew the game was close to reaching its peak daily users.

“To have any chance of keeping that audience and even, who knows, maybe growing it a little bit, we had to preserve ‘Wordle’ as an internet treasure. So our engineering and design teams made it mission number one ‘don’t hurt Wordle,'” he said.

Still, stumbles happened. In February, problems with transferring the game to the NYT servers ended up erasing the users’ results history.

Shortly after, when changing the list of words to meet the newspaper’s standards, a problem in updating the game ended up causing people to get different words to guess on the same day, disturbing the social character of the game of sharing your daily performance with friends.

In addition, the withdrawal of some terms ended up not being well accepted by users. “We took out some less appropriate words for a family game. Some racist slurs and profanity, things like that,” says Bell. “But people noticed, and then came the criticisms and articles. ‘Why is the NYT trying to police the words people use to try to guess the answer?’ We quickly realized that this was hurting the game, so we listened to players and backed out.”

On the other hand, among the changes that ended up being maintained was the inclusion of an icon that took the “Wordle” player to other games in the newspaper. Implemented in mid-February, it sent users of the other games on the NYT platform exploding, giving the first signs of what the new game could do for the service and the newspaper as a whole.

By that time, however, the game was already showing signs of losing popularity. In March, “Wordle” reached its peak of daily users – the exact number was not disclosed – and Bell decided it was time to put more aggressive changes in place to drive users to the newspaper’s other products.

“‘Spelling Bee’ is one of our most addictive games. The challenge was to let ‘Wordle’ users know that ‘Spelling Bee’ existed,” says Bell.

The strategy adopted was to place a small ad on the final screen of the game inviting users to test the title. “It wasn’t an intrusive thing. If it was a completely different game, maybe that would hurt. But people who like ‘Wordle’ also like ‘Spelling Bee.’ ‘ doubled.”

At that point, the association between “Wordle” and the newspaper was already so strong that an internal survey identified in mid-2022 that 35% of subscribers to the NYT gaming service said they kept their subscription because of the game, even though it continues to be free to date.

“‘Wordle’ adds value to our overall subscriptions by making it easy to play all your favorite games in one place. What this survey and others have done is solidify our thinking to keep ‘Wordle’ out of our portfolio [de jogos pagos]but also that it needs the same attention as the rest of our games,” says Bell.

In the same way that it helped to increase the number of subscribers to the gaming platform, “Wordle” also helped the NYT to expand its number of registered users.

In July of last year, in its last major update, the game now has the possibility of accessing its records and sequence of successes on all platforms. For this, the user needs to create an account at NYT and log in when playing.

“We want people to register, selfishly, because the user path goes from anonymous to registered to subscriber. And if you can get them to take a step in that direction, they’re more likely to take close,” admits Bell. “But we also wanted people to stop losing their records when they deleted their cookies or changed their phones, and players wanted that too. So it was a good deal.”

The next step was to overcome technical obstacles to bring the game to all the newspaper’s platforms. Again, the inclusion of the game in the NYT news apps increased the popularity of these products, capable of retaining users even more.

“As with every blockbuster game, it was part happy accident and part careful planning,” says Bell. “If we had taken an alternate route with ‘Wordle’ and monetized it immediately maybe some of the revenue numbers would have been higher, but I firmly believe it would be a short-lived game and we’re playing for the long haul.”

For the future, Bell envisions increasing the integration of “Wordle” with more games on the platform. After surveys with subscribers and users, it was decided that the newspaper’s sudoku game will be the next to receive a little push.

As for the emergence of a new viral hit like “Wordle,” Bell thinks it’s unlikely to be a puzzle like the NYT puts on its service. “But our eyes and ears are open.”