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Nice job to the developer, this is probably the perfect time to sell. Honestly, I could imagine the price dropping by half in a few weeks as the fad dies down.

Let NYT figure out how to monetize a simple easily copied game like this. I don't envy the team who is responsible for making this deal profitable for them.

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This seems to fit very nicely into the set of mini games they sell a separate subscription to. And if their own claims are to be believed it seems that they have already successfully monetized them https://www.nytco.com/press/both-cooking-and-games-reach-1-m...

Meh, other than the crossword, the other ones are fairly trivial games. Simon Tatham's puzzle pack [0] for example has 5x more games for free and ported to most platforms.

[0] https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

The NYT makes money from paid subscriptions. Anything that increases the virality of their subscriber acquisition is going to make back a whole bunch of money. There are lots of people that subscribe to the NYT principally for the games, which Wordle fits into nicely.

This deal makes perfect sense for NYT. I don't see it making sense for a lot of other companies (they don't already have an engine that you can stick games into and get subscriber dollars out of, and building that engine will swamp the cost of Wordle itself), but here, sure.

Hasbro would have been another one: stick it next to the sales page for Scrabble, pretty strong audience overlap I would think, and they have an instant winner due to the reduced marketing costs.

NYT has been charging separately and extra for access to their word games online for years. 'tptacek's explanation isn't wrong, it just undersells it by a lot - word games have been an NYT premium sub business since before their news digital sub business took off.

I did not mean to imply that he was wrong, merely that from the sellers point of view there may have been other options.

Oh I meant it as - he's slightly-wrong-by-omission. NYT are (somewhat weirdly) the OG online word game hustlers.

They have a games subscription that people like me pay for. I'd just consider this adding a bit of value to an already solid subscription.

NYT has already monetized simple word games. Their puzzle subscription is very popular.

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