So we can actually track, like, “Oh, that was a tough day.” You even see that in WordleBot, like, “Oh, the average was 4.8.” You’re really only seeing the people that are playing that have registered with a New York Times account that’s connected on the site that they’re playing WordleBot, so it’s a subset of the total audience. Now that we’ve rewritten the game and connected it to our backend and brought it into our systems, we can actually see the average score per day across the whole audience. When you say harder on average, is that based on a general perception, or do you have actual numbers? I think there was a week in there where on average, the game was a little harder not long after we bought it, and that probably contributed to those perceptions, but that was not based upon anything we had done. She was great, ’cause she kind of defended us. I’ll never forget watching the Today Show and Savannah Guthrie and whoever else is on that show arguing about whether we’d made the game harder or not. Anytime it comes up in conversation at dinner parties or conventions or family gatherings, I mean, just everybody knows what we’re talking about. I literally almost never meet someone who hasn’t played Wordle. And you do expect that that will come down, and largely that’s a factor of just fewer new users every day discovering your game because everybody’s already discovered it. I’ve been in the games industry personally for a very long time and have seen viral games explode and go through kind of their life cycle, and as with anything like this, of course you can’t sustain the peak of your total viral explosion. We’re very pleased with the ongoing engagement with the game. People are definitely still playing Wordle. Are people playing less? Or playing but talking about it less? Judging by conversation alone, the Wordle craze has definitely died down some. But it’s still a quite large and healthy audience. For sure there are fewer people playing Wordle today than there were at the height of its popularity. Over time, especially once we migrated it to the New York Times, people began to come to Wordle each morning, each day, whenever they decided to play, through some different channels. Jonathan Knight: I think it doesn’t tell the full story, because for a while, typing Wordle into Google was actually the way that you would start playing Wordle for a lot of people. None of that is conclusive, though, and clearly someone must still be playing: There are still all those websites publishing “clues” for solving the puzzle every single day. (These numbers come from a Twitter bot created by Kevin O’Connor, a software engineer, to track Wordle activity on Twitter.) Google searches also seem to tell a story. That sounds like a lot, until you consider that in February of this year, that number was regularly topping 300,000. It’s undeniable that fewer people are talking about the game and posting their scores on social media: On a recent Monday, 30,214 people publicly tweeted their Wordle grids. However, somewhere along the way, I know that I personally drifted away from playing it every day, and there are signs I’m not alone. At the end of January, the New York Times bought Wordle from its inventor, Josh Wardle, for an undisclosed sum in the “low seven figures.” The purchase was met with some skepticism-had Wordle sold out?-but the game stayed largely the same, and the Times even figured out how to maintain users’ stats as the paper integrated it into its platform.
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