The Last Wordle Archive Shutting Down Might Backfire

gamerant.com:

Wordle is currently one of the most popular online games out there thanks to its viral status, which eventually net Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle an offer from The New York Times to purchase the game. Wordle is now available on the official website of The New York Times, which has garnered thousands of players over the past few months to try and get the daily word right before it's gone. The fact that Wordle can only be played daily is part of its charm for some gamers, but for others, it might induce the fear of missing out, or FOMO for short.

In this context, the fear of missing out on Wordle means that players who don't guess the daily word before it vanishes can feel bad at the idea of having to play within a certain timeframe in order to avoid that. As such, a great way to play Wordle at one's pace was to visit Wordle archives spread throughout the Internet, which used all the previously available words and Wordle's signature style to provide access to content that's not there anymore. However, all the Wordle archives have been forced to shut down by The New York Times, with the last one of them just a couple of days ago, and this move might backfire.

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Because Wordle is now the intellectual property of The New York Times, other websites can't use the game to generate traffic to their own domain, even if that's by offering a simple archive service that the official game is still lacking. As such, The New York Times issued notices to Wordle archive websites to shut them down immediately, a move that's likely thought to take that online traffic back to the source of the original game.

Because of this, now fans of the game have no way to replay older levels, and they can