The New York Times Games

The New York Times Games (NYT Games) is a collection of casual print and online games published by The New York Times, an American newspaper. Originated with the crossword in 1942, NYT Games was officially established on August 21, 2014, with the addition of the Mini Crossword. Most puzzles of The New York Times Games are published and refreshed daily, mirroring The Times' daily newspaper cadence.

The New York Times Games is part of a concerted effort by the paper to raise its digital subscription as its print-based sales dwindle. Since its launch, NYT Games has reached viral popularity and has become one of the main revenue drivers for The New York Times. As of 2024, NYT Games has over 10 million daily players across all platforms and over one million premium subscribers. According to one member of staff, "The half joke that is repeated internally is that The New York Times is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news."

History

1942–2014: The New York Times Crossword

The New York Times has used video games as part of its journalistic efforts, among the first publications to do so, contributing to an increase in Internet traffic; In the late 1990s and early 2000s, The New York Times began offering its newspaper online, and along with it the crossword puzzles, allowing readers to solve puzzles on their computers. This marked the beginning of a digital expansion that would later include a variety of games beyond crosswords.

2014–2022: Release

In 2014, The New York Times officially launched The New York Times Games with the addition of the Mini Crossword. In the same year, The New York Times Magazine introduced Spelling Bee, a word game in which players guess words from a set of letters in a honeycomb and are awarded points for the length of the word and receive extra points if the word is a pangram. The game was proposed by Will Shortz, created by Frank Longo, and has been maintained by Sam Ezersky. In May 2018, Spelling Bee was published on NYTimes.com, furthering its popularity. In February 2019, the Times introduced Letter Boxed, in which players form words from letters placed on the edges of a square box, followed in June 2019 by Tiles, a matching game in which players form sequences of tile pairings, and Vertex, in which players connect vertices to assemble an image.

2022–present: Acquisition of Wordle and further growth

In January 2022, The New York Times Company acquired Wordle, a word game developed by Josh Wardle in 2021, at a valuation in the "low-seven figures". The acquisition was proposed by David Perpich, a member of the Sulzberger family who proposed the purchase to Knight over Slack after reading about the game. The Washington Post purportedly considered acquiring Wordle, according to Vanity Fair. At the 2022 Game Developers Conference, Wardle stated that he was overwhelmed by the volume of Wordle facsimiles and overzealous monetization practices in other games. Concerns over The New York Times monetizing Wordle by implementing a paywall mounted; Wordle is a client-side browser game and can be played offline by downloading its webpage. Wordle moved to the Times's servers and website in February. The game was added to the NYT Games application in August, necessitating it be rewritten in the JavaScript library React. In November, The New York Times announced that Tracy Bennett would be the Wordle's editor.

In March 2023, the NYT Crosswords app was renamed to NYT Games to address the application's other games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Tiles, and Sudoku. According to Jonathan Knight, chief executive of The New York Times Games, the Times was concerned over how the application would rank in search results for "crossword".

In July 2023, The New York Times introduced Connections, in which players identify groups of words that are connected by a common property. In April, the Times introduced Digits, a number-based game; Digits was shut down in August. In March 2024, The New York Times introduced the beta game Strands, a word game in which players connect letters in a grid to reveal a group of words sharing a common theme.

List of games

Current

Former

Popularity and impact

Since its inception, The New York Times Games' player base has grown rapidly. In 2020, more than 28 million people played at least one game. Within one year from October 2022 to 2023, the number of average daily active users in the Games app tripled from 886,000 to over 2.6 million, while as of 2024, Games has over 10 million daily players across all platforms, both app and website.

NYT Games has had major impact on popular culture and discourse, including online. Social media in particular contributed to its rising popularity, with users posting their NYT Games' puzzle results en masse thanks to Games' ease of sharing. Wordle results were shared 1.2 million times on Twitter (now X) between January 1 and 13 of 2022, while Connections results similarly trending. On TikTok as of May 2024, 140,000 videos with the hashtag #wordle were present, with videos about Connections "regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views". Accounts dedicated to solving NYT Games' crosswords and puzzles amassed millions of followers, with several figures converting these accounts into full-time jobs.

Thanks to its popularity, some NYT Games' editors reached celebrity status. Will Shortz, the NYT Crossword editor since 1993, is an American cultural icon and has a large dedicated following, while other puzzles' editors like Sam Ezersky (for the Spelling Bee) and Wyna Liu (for Connections) get tagged frequently on Twitter by their subsequent game's “die-hard” fan base, albeit sometimes negatively due to complaints about the day's puzzle construction itself.

Games has become one of the main revenue drivers for The New York Times. As of 2023, NYT Games has "over one million" premium subscribers, with then chief product officer Alex Hardiman credited Games as one of the large factor in the Times' overarching news subscriber growth, mentioning "a lot of people are actually buying the bundle through our Games product." In an SEC filing, Games has more popularity and interaction than any other products The New York Times offers, including its core news offering. According to one member of staff, "The half joke that is repeated internally is that The New York Times is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news," as reportedly "[p]eople who engage with both news and games on any given week have the best long-term subscriber retention of any product combination". First-party advertising campaigns on NYT Games website have above-average level of awareness, attributed to "the brief nature of the Times’ puzzles, which are designed to be completed in a matter of minutes, [which] also means they elicit a heightened level of focus from players".

Notes

References

External links

• Official website

1. The New York Times
2. The New York Times crossword
3. The New York Times Strands
4. The New York Times Connections
5. The New York Times Spelling Bee
6. Times Square
7. Wordle
8. Online platforms of The New York Times
9. List of New York Times employees
10. History of The New York Times (1998–present)
11. The New York Times Crosswords
12. New York Giants (baseball)
13. Times Square Ball
14. Tracy Bennett
15. New York City
16. Letter Boxed
17. New York Mets
18. New York Knicks
19. New York Giants
20. New York (state)