For subscribers to the New York Times as interested in solving Wordle or doing the crossword as in reading the latest news, Wednesday was a big day. The Times' popular Games unit debuted Crossplay, a Scrabble-like electronic game that represents the paper's first designed multiplayer game. It's also the outlet's 11th game, joining a lineup of puzzles played more than 11.2 billion times in 2025, reports the AP. Ancillary products like Games, a cooking app, and Wirecutter product recommendations have fueled remarkable digital growth at the Times over the past decade. "It has been a huge boon to the journalism," says Northeastern professor Dan Kennedy.
The Times likens itself to a solar system, where the newspaper is the sun, with the other products serving as the planets revolving around it. Some have jokingly referred to it as a game company that happens to have news. YipitData reported that in 2023, subscribers spent more time in Games than they did with the digital newspaper. The Times reported 12.33 million subscribers by the end of last September, up 9% from 2024, with all but about a half million of them digital. Subscription revenue for digital-only products increased by 14%, while last year saw a decrease in people subscribing to just the news.
Puzzles, contests, and games aren't novel for newspapers. The Times introduced its crossword puzzle in 1942, and it went digital in 2009. It was late last decade when its Spelling Bee game became popular, particularly among people intimidated by the crossword. The game changer, however, came in 2022, with the arrival of the addictive puzzle known as Wordle, a game developed by Brooklyn software engineer Josh Wardle that requires players to guess a five-letter word by eliminating potential letters. Last year, Wordle was played 4.2 billion times. Morning social feeds brim with people posting their results and bragging about—or lamenting—their performance that day.
The enduring popularity of the board game Scrabble points to Crossplay's potential, and improving on the ad-choked Scrabble GO app would seem a low bar to surmount. The games are similar, though there are some small differences in how Crossplay is played—how the game board is designed and some letter values, for example. People can invite friends to play or compete against a computer, keep track of records, and engage with the "Cross Bot" feature, which gives a postgame analysis and tells players about moves they could've made to score more points. Unlike some of the other individual Times games, people can download a specific Crossplay app. More here.
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