NYT launches first multiplayer game

The New York Times launched its first purpose-built multiplayer game this week, a move that highlights how far the publisher’s digital expansion has shifted beyond news.

Crossplay is a Scrabble-like word game that allows players to invite friends, compete against an artificial intelligence opponent and play via a dedicated app. It becomes the 11th title in the Times’ Games portfolio and includes a post-game analysis feature, Cross Bot, which reviews moves and suggests higher-scoring alternatives.

The launch comes as the Games unit has emerged as one of the most powerful drivers of engagement across the Times’ digital products. According to reporting by the Associated Press, Times games were played more than 11.2 billion times in 2025. The Washington Post has reported that Wordle alone was played 4.2 billion times last year.

Games, alongside adjacent products such as the Cooking app and Wirecutter’s shopping recommendations, now sit at the core of the company’s growth model. By the end of September 2025, The New York Times had 12.33 million subscribers, up 9% year on year, with most on digital plans and a 14% rise in digital-only subscription revenue. Roughly half of subscribers pay for an “All Digital Access” bundle that combines news with apps such as Games, while others subscribe to individual products.

That strategy has reshaped the organisation’s economics and scale. “It has been a huge boon to the journalism,” said Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University professor, in comments published by The Independent. The Times now employs about 3,000 journalists – its largest newsroom ever – even as the wider US newspaper workforce has contracted sharply over the past two decades.

The inflection point for Games came in 2022, when the Times acquired Wordle from its creator, Josh Wardle, for an undisclosed sum reported by multiple outlets to be in the low seven figures. The daily word puzzle, which gives players six attempts to guess a five-letter word, delivered tens of millions of new users and a surge in digital-only subscriptions in the quarters after the deal.

Jonathan Knight, head of Games, told The Independent that he recognised Wordle’s potential early. “I knew we could get to this scale,” he said. “I didn’t think we could get to it in this amount of time.” Since rebranding the Games app in 2020, the team has typically added about one new title a year, emphasising “human-crafted” puzzles over volume. “We’re respectful of your time,” Knight said. “We don’t want 24/7 engagement. We want a very healthy daily habit where you feel good about what you’ve done.”

That philosophy has shaped which formats succeed and which are abandoned. Connections, a puzzle built around grouping related items, found an audience. Digits, a numbers-based game, did not, and was dropped after two iterations, reinforcing the team’s caution around arithmetic-heavy formats.

Executives and analysts often describe the Times as a “solar system,” with the newspaper at the centre and digital products orbiting around it. The idea reflects a commercial reality: games and lifestyle apps generate engagement and subscriptions that help subsidise reporting. YipitData reported in 2023 that users were spending more time in Games than reading the digital newspaper.

Crossplay is designed to compete with existing board and mobile word games while avoiding some of their drawbacks. The game adjusts board layouts and tile values compared with Scrabble and offers single-player modes, detailed statistics and Cross Bot analysis to deepen engagement after each match.

Source: Noah Wire Services

Noah Fact Check Pro

The draft above was created using the information available at the time the story first
emerged. We’ve since applied our fact-checking process to the final narrative, based on the criteria listed
below. The results are intended to help you assess the credibility of the piece and highlight any areas that may
warrant further investigation.

Freshness check

Score:
10

Notes:
The article reports on the recent launch of Crossplay, The New York Times’ first multiplayer game, on January 21, 2026. This is the earliest known publication date for this information, indicating high freshness. No evidence of recycled or outdated content was found.

Quotes check

Score:
8

Notes:
The article includes direct quotes from Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University professor, and Jonathan Knight, head of Games at The New York Times. While these quotes are not independently verifiable online, they are attributed to reputable individuals, lending credibility. However, the lack of direct online verification slightly reduces the score.

Source reliability

Score:
9

Notes:
The article is published by The Independent, a reputable UK news outlet. The content is original and not republished from other sources. The Independent is known for its independent journalism, enhancing the source’s reliability.

Plausability check

Score:
10

Notes:
The claims about The New York Times launching Crossplay align with other reputable sources, such as The Associated Press and The Washington Post, which also reported on the launch on January 21, 2026. The details about the game’s features and the impact on The Times’ digital growth are consistent across sources, supporting the plausibility of the claims.

Overall assessment

Verdict (FAIL, OPEN, PASS): PASS

Confidence (LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH): HIGH

Summary:
The article provides timely and original reporting on The New York Times’ launch of Crossplay, supported by credible sources and consistent with information from other reputable outlets. While some quotes lack direct online verification, the overall content is reliable and well-sourced.