New York Times Buys Wordle For A 'Low Seven Figure Price' - Will The Game Remain Free?

The new and popular word game Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, the publication has announced. The purchase was announced by The Times on Monday, and said that the five-letter word guessing game reflects the growing importance of games like crosswords, spelling bee, and more in the company?s aim to increase digital subscriptions to 10 million by 2025. The New York Time Company acquired Wordle from its creator Josh Wardle who is a software engineer in Brooklyn.

NYT did not unveil the amount it has acquired Wordle for, but the publications said that it has been bought for a price ?in the low seven figures.? The company said that the game would remain free to new and existing players initially. NYT said that the game first appeared in October, and had about 90 users till November 1. This grew to 300,000 by the middle of January, and now millions of people play the game daily. ?The Times remains focused on becoming the essential subscription for every English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world,? the New York Times said.

Wordle comes with a feature that enables users to share their performance with rows for five bricks indicating how close they were to guessing the correct word or how quickly they guessed the word.

Wordle is a word game where you have to guess a five-letter word. A green-coloured brick indicates that the letter is correct, and in the exact place. A yellow brick indicates that the letter exists in the word but in a different place. A grey or black brick indicates that the letter does not exist in the word.

New York Times has had a paywall since 2011, and its business strategy has revolved around persuading readers and users to get Times content digitally. The company has subscriptions to its newspapers, a core digital news app, a games app, a recipe app, and now has Wirecutter, which is a product-recommendation site that the company bought in 2016. Earlier this month, New York Times also bought the sports website The Athletic.

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