Paying the creator was also the classy thing to do. Spending "low seven figures" is not a big deal for the NYT financially, but it's a significant token of goodwill (well, to everyone other than the author of this article).
> Creator of Wordle: I can’t keep running this thing; I love the NYT puzzle peeps, they inspired me to make this thing you love, so I sold it to them! Twitter: How dare you give this thing we love a sustaining home!
> Honestly, people. The choice isn’t between Wordle as it exists today and NYT Wordle. It is between no Wordle and NYT Wordle, or even worse, a much crummier acquirer.
Absolute horseshit. Wordle requires nothing more than static hosting for a single small page. Maintenance costs (and effort) are literally zero.
You cut the quote too early and fully changed the author's meaning.
The author isn't talking about the financial costs of running the site. As you noted, those are near zero.
The "cost" referred to is the emotional/psychological one of suddenly being responsible for something that millions of people feel very passionate about. That's a non-zero cost for many people, and not a cost that everyone may want to take on.
(To avoid confusion, I edited my comment to add "(and effort)" just before the reply above was posted.)
The article goes on to say it "costs Wardle a few bucks a day to host", which is an overestimate possibly by a factor of infinity, depending how he's hosting it.
As for the effort, there is none. Part of the genius of wordle is that it is zero maintenance.*
And as for the "psychological burden" do you have any evidence besides a statement made after the nyt paid him over a million dollars for it that there was any such burden? This guy has invented massively popular things before: The Button and The Place at Reddit.
For that matter, any evidence that the statement wasn't simply written by the NYT for him and a condition of his offer? In it he says it's important to him that "... as Wordle grows, it continues to provide a great experience to everyone" - that just doesn't ring true. He never showed any intention of expanding it functionally, and its expansion in terms of user base requires no action at all from him as there is no infrastructure to scale. And he knows this, of course, having developed it.
Finally, even if somehow in the absence of any maintenance effort the "psychological burden" of owning it was too much it didn't need a 7 figure knight in shining armour to save him from it. People are running clones everywhere. Any number of people would have gladly taken it off his hands.
* This is easy to verify. You can just save the page to disk, point any webserver at it and it works perfectly. No DB, no server-side logic or state of any kind.
Given the thing of value is the amount of people hitting the website, you'd want to leverage that to promote whatever you want to promote, locking it behind a paywall would instantly kill the visitors and more than likely everyone would just scatter and go find a clone (or move on to something else)
I prefer Kottke's take:
https://kottke.org/22/02/wordle-sold-to-the-ny-times-and-tha...