Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
More:Daily news, true crime, and more USA TODAY podcasts
Hey there listeners, it’s Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. I feel like this podcast has turned into a Wordle tribute pod. That is not the case, so there’s just been a lot of stuff happening around Wordle. We can’t stop playing it, we can’t get enough of it, but now big changes might be coming to the popular daily word puzzle game.
On Monday, The New York Times confirmed it is buying Wordle. It said it acquired the game from creator, Josh Wardel, Josh Wardle, excuse me, for a price quote in the low seven figures. The newspaper said Wordle will initially stay free for new and existing players.
If you don’t know anything about Wordle, it’s a browser-based game, you have six tries to guess a five letter word, the letters change depending on what you guess. So if there’s a letter in green, that means that it’s in the right spot and it’s the right letter, if it’s in gray, it’s not in the word at all.
It’s been a lot of fun. A lot of the reason it’s popular obviously is all the social media posts you see of Wordle, people trying to solve it or not solve it, and you see how quickly they did it and what their process was. The reaction to this of course has been mixed, with obviously the biggest question and the biggest concern, will Wordle still be available for free to play?
Again, the newspaper and Wordle said that the game will initially stay free for new and existing players. Here’s the thing though, one of two things will likely happen. One is there’s a subscription that you might have to pay. They somehow pull it in and you subscribe, and that’s how you get to play Wordle, or they keep it free, but you may have to log in to The New York Times. You get an account and that allows you to play Wordle.
So one way or another, I don’t expect Wordle to stay as is, where you just go to the site, you play every day and that’s it. You don’t have to input your email, you don’t have to do anything, it’s just really straightforward. I think that’s going to go away at some point it feels like. Obviously, a lot of people are upset by that.
There were some folks though that were very supportive of Wardle who created this and was able to cash in on the success of the game. Because, look, there have been a lot of different variations of the game that have popped up on browsers and on apps, it got to a point where Apple had to remove multiple apps that had ripped off the game because it was so popular. The fact that he was able to financially benefit from all this, just making this game as quickly as he did and to just reap the benefits, a lot of people thought that that was great and they fully support it.
But I think obviously the bigger thing is we’ve had this great run so far with Wordle and playing it every day, and it’s been one of the bright spots of 2022 and the thought of it being acquired and potentially changed, most likely maybe having to either pay for it or give some piece of ourselves in order to play it, it’s bummed some people out.
You can read more about the reactions to Wordle, more on the news about The New York Times buying them, as well as any info. If you need tips, if you want to learn about similar games like Wordle, you can go to tech.USAtoday.com for the latest.
Listeners, let’s hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas? Any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter @BrettMolina23. Please don’t forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. Don’t forget, subscribe to the Talking Tech newsletter, it’s out every Thursday. Go to newsletters.USAtoday.com.
You’ve been listening to Talking Tech. We’ll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.
