>so I would imagine they have the developer skills to recreate Wordle
To be fair, I think most averagely skilled developers could copy Wordle within a very short time. I am very much reminded of the game 2048 though. While it definitely was a fad too, it still has a huge base of players even now. So maybe the NY Times sees some potential there.
That's disingenuous. While they are both sliding matching games, the end result is quite different. I actually preferred 2048 to Threes. It was much more relaxed and casual.
If anything, Threes made it big thanks to 2048. I would never have heard of it and bought it otherwise.
IIRC the author of 2048 decided not to monitise it because he based it on Threes, and only wrote it to see if he could write a game from scratch in a weekend.
To be fair, I think most averagely skilled developers could copy Wordle within a very short time. I am very much reminded of the game 2048 though. While it definitely was a fad too, it still has a huge base of players even now. So maybe the NY Times sees some potential there.