Writing code does not make for a finished project.
This guy got the deal because he had the user base. I don't know how much of that was luck, how much was smart iterating over a simple idea until it "clicked" with heaps of people, or how much of it was subtle but powerful viral marketing tactics.
You're right, I suspect 75+% of people here could have a working implementation of this in an afternoon. But none of us did. And none of us have over a million DAU. And none of us closed a deal with NYTimes. Josh did. In 4 months. While holding down a day job. Major respect from me.
The idea and code is about as worthless as the idea of selling identical hamburgers everywhere across the globe. An "easy" idea and plan to have. McDonalds out-executed pretty much everyone there.
https://slate.com/culture/2022/01/wordle-game-creator-wardle...
that he built the first prototype in 2013. So it's not exactly an overnight success.
From the same article, he says the two big changes he made were that
1/ the first prototype allowed for continuous play, ie when you got one word right it immediately offered another, instead of having one word per day
2/ the list of possible 5-letter words was reduced to "common" words (you can guess using all existing words, but the words to be discovered are usual ones, not obscure words nobody ever uses).
The second element is a kind of "dumbing down" that broadens the audience, and the first one clearly has a social element to it.
But it's essentially Hangman, isn't it? With, actually, a worse user interface.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python-program-for-word-guessi...
I'm not sure where NYT is doing here. It's not like the idea can be patented, and the popularity has not been proven anything other than a Twitter fad. It's the next Sudoku - it's already been cracked to be absolutely brain-dead simple to cheat.
McDonalds is a weird analogy to bring up, as the end product is absolute lowest common denominator trash food.
But yeah - all the best to Mr. Dan - lottery ticket printed out. Users as the product and all that.
And literally nobody except Josh has closed a million buck deal for it...
It kinda proves my McDonalds point (however bad an example that might be). Nobody even needed to think up the word game idea. Anybody (at least in this site's demographic) could build it. McDonalds are pretty much the only organisation that've succeeded in opening up burger joints across the globe, even though it's an easy idea and making burgers isn't hard.
The "wordle" brand alone is easily worth $1m