The New York Times Company (NYT) has bought the wildly popular puzzler Wordle.
Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle, agreed to sell the game for an undisclosed price around “low-seven figures,” according to NYT. Wordle will remain free “initially” for all players, though the company did not clarify for how long.
“It has been incredible to watch a game bring so much joy to so many, and I feel so grateful for the personal stories some of you have shared with me,” Wardle said on Twitter. “If you’ve followed along with the story of Wordle, you’ll know that NTY games play a big part in its original and so this step feels very natural to me.”
An update on Wordle pic.twitter.com/TmHd0AIRLX
— Josh Wardle (@powerlanguish) January 31, 2022
Wardle mentions that Wordle will move to NTY’s site and will be free-to-play for everyone.
Despite Wordle’s rising popularity, this wasn’t the biggest acquisition within the video game industry. Sony picked-up Destiny studio Bungie for $3.6 billion, though the company will still make multiplatform titles. Amazingly, that figure pales compared to the $12.7 billion Take-Two spent on Zynga or Microsoft’s $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.
January was apparently the month of acquisitions if all of this is anything to go by, and it’s hard to imagine deals will get much wilder than all of this.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
