#Tiles nyt game plus#
All of that, plus a very clean design that doesn’t yell at you. You solve something and you come back the next day for the next puzzle.
We don’t monetize the experience beyond that. We offer high quality puzzle games at a fair subscription price. You know as well as I do that there are a lot of mobile free-to-play games out there that tend to just suck the life out of you and keep you engaged 24/7 and monetizing every moment. Second, I think our puzzles are time well spent. We have an editor on Spelling Bee who curates that puzzle every day. We draw on the community of puzzle constructors and have a great process there for getting puzzles out every day. He’s been the crossword editor since 1993. We have what we think is the world’s best puzzle editing team, still led by Will Shortz. Knight: Setting Sudoku aside for a second, the rest of them are all human-made and curated. GamesBeat: Do they all share some identity around language? Is there something consistent that connects them to the New York Times? The Crossword and Mini, Spelling Bee, and Wordle are the three big tentpoles. And then I would say finally we have a Sudoku puzzle we run every day. We have all daily puzzles made by humans, curated and edited with New York Times standards for rigor and wit and relevance and so forth. And from there, Tiles, Letter Boxed, and Vertex, which are three additional expansion games.
There’s a leaderboard associated with that. The Crossword Mini, which is a really fun bite-sized five-by-five crossword puzzle you can do every day in a minute or two. That began an effort to rebrand from the New York Times Crossword to New York Times Games. That’s when the company realized we had an opportunity for a portfolio of games, and not just the Crossword. Spelling Bee plus the Crossword, we were seeing subscriptions generated by Spelling Bee really stack on top of the Crossword subscriptions. We launched Spelling Bee about four years ago. And then steadily began growing game subscriptions in parallel to the news subscription. We launched an iOS app for the Crossword in 2009. We went digital with it early on in the world wide web. But the Crossword has really been that anchor product. We’ve lived with that legacy ever since, with games being a fun distraction from the news. We ran the first crossword puzzle in 1942 on Sunday during a tough news cycle at the time, which was a big choice the paper made. Knight: The anchor product is of course the New York Times Crossword. GamesBeat: How large is the whole portfolio of games? What else do you have? It’s a little something we can all agree on. They continue to engage with the game every day. People have moved into their friend chats, WhatsApp threads and what-have-you. That percentage has not changed since day one, which is incredible. We see a huge percentage of the audience sharing their scores every day. It’s calmed down a bit since then, but we’re seeing a very large audience still engaged with the game every day. New York Times gameboards.īut it was a true phenomenon, a crazy time. That’s when I realized that maybe we had peaked. I was watching Anderson Cooper interview Monica Lewinsky about Wordle on CNN. It’s obviously come down a bit from its height, as any viral explosion will. We’re pretty pleased with the sustained amount of engagement with Wordle every day, from audiences all over the world. Not long after the acquisition we said that Wordle brought tens of millions of new users into the New York Times ecosystem. Knight: We’re not giving out a lot of super specific figures. GamesBeat: Have you talked about how well Wordle has done to date? We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of Wordle with the Times. We’ve had a lot of growth, accelerated by the Wordle acquisition at the beginning of last year. Games are an essential part of our overall strategy as a company. I’m excited and bullish on the opportunity. Jonathan Knight: A little over two years. GamesBeat: It’s an interesting place you’ve wound up. Jonathan Knight is head of games at the New York Times. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. I talked to Knight about the business recently.
Wordle superfans like Meghan Markle, Stanley Tucci and Jimmy Fallon regularly tout the game to their massive audiences. A new study found that Wordle is the most popular word game in America (44% of those surveyed play).Īll told, the New York Times Games were played nearly four billion times in 2022 and it has tens of millions of players every day. The world’s most respected newspaper seems like a funny company to be in the games business, but keeping readers engaged and happy on the New York Times web site is important, and nothing is more engaging than games.
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