This just in from The New York Times: Its first 2-player game, and an evolving business model

The New York Times is expanding its digital gaming empire this week with the debut of Crossplay, a Scrabble-like multiplayer game that marks a significant milestone for the publication’s increasingly influential Games division.

Crossplay becomes the eleventh game in The Times’ popular suite of digital puzzles, which collectively saw more than 11.2 billion plays in 2023. The new offering represents the company’s first designed multiplayer experience, allowing users to challenge friends or compete against a computer opponent.

The Times’ growing portfolio of ancillary products—including Games, a cooking app, and Wirecutter product recommendations—has fueled remarkable digital growth over the past decade, helping sustain the publication’s core journalistic mission in an otherwise troubled media landscape.

“It has been a huge boon to the journalism,” notes Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University professor. The Times now employs approximately 3,000 journalists—its largest newsroom ever and more than double its staff from a decade ago. This growth contrasts sharply with industry-wide declines that have seen U.S. newspaper journalism jobs plummet from over 350,000 in 2005 to just 91,550 last year, according to Northwestern University research.

The Times’ digital subscription model has proven remarkably resilient. By September 2023, the company reported 12.33 million subscribers, a 9% increase from the previous year, with nearly all subscriptions being digital. Subscription revenue for digital-only products rose by 14%. About half of subscribers opt for the comprehensive $30 monthly bundle that includes all products, while others purchase specific offerings.

Jonathan Knight, the company’s head of games, expressed pride in his division’s contribution to the broader mission: “I now get out of bed in the morning knowing that the work I do is advancing the mission that we have as a company—seek the truth, understand the world, keep the journalists independent and well-funded.”

While newspapers have long featured puzzles and games, The Times’ current gaming strategy represents a deliberate digital evolution. The crossword puzzle, introduced in print in 1942, went digital in 2009. Later in the decade, the spelling bee game found popularity among users intimidated by the crossword’s complexity.

The true game-changer came in 2022 with the acquisition of Wordle, a word-guessing puzzle developed by Brooklyn software engineer Josh Wardle. Knight moved quickly to acquire the viral sensation after seeing colleagues play it online. Last year, Wordle alone was played 4.2 billion times, with players routinely sharing results on social media.

“I knew we could get to this scale,” Knight said. “I didn’t think we could get to it in this amount of time.”

The Times has been strategic in expanding its games portfolio, generally adding just one new game annually while maintaining strict quality standards. Knight emphasizes that the games are “human-crafted” and designed to create healthy engagement patterns rather than addictive behavior.

“We’re respectful of your time,” Knight explained. “We’re not trying to get you in the app all day. We’re not nagging you to come back in. We don’t want 24/7 engagement. We want a very healthy daily habit where you feel good about what you’ve done.”

Not every game succeeds. Digits, a logic puzzle with numbers, failed despite two attempts, leading Knight to be “cautious about math and numbers games ever since.” By contrast, Connections—where players group related items—has proven highly popular.

The Games team maintains close relationships with users through newsletters and dedicated forums. “They are fanatical,” Knight said of the community. “They care deeply. They’re very passionate. They’re also very kind and joyful people, and we really value engaging with the community all the time.”

Crossplay builds on the enduring popularity of Scrabble while offering some distinctive features. Players can track their performance history and utilize the Cross Bot feature for postgame analysis, which highlights potentially higher-scoring moves they might have missed. Unlike some other Times games, Crossplay will be available as a standalone app.

The Times’ gaming strategy has become so successful that some have jokingly referred to the company as “a game company that happens to have news.” Research from YipitData in 2023 suggested subscribers spent more time in Games than with the digital newspaper, though current comparative data isn’t available.

This entertainment-driven approach to subscriber retention comes as traditional news-only subscriptions decreased last year, highlighting the growing importance of the publication’s broader digital ecosystem in sustaining its journalistic mission.