Buying the popular puzzle game Wordle was apparently a good thing for The New York Times† Company announced its quarterly results on Wednesday and credited Wordle for a huge jump in new subscribers. “Wordle brought unprecedented tens of millions of new users to The Times,” Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in a publication of the results, “many of whom stayed to play other games” and delivered the best gaming-related quarter ever.
The Time acquired Wordle in January from creator Josh Wardle, saying it paid “an undisclosed price in the low seven digits” to do so. Now it’s in the Time‘ collection of games, which also includes two daily crosswords, Spelling Bee, Sudoku, Vertex, Letter Boxed, and Tiles. (By the way, if you are a fan of word games and have never done this before) tried Letter Boxedit’s a good one.) They all come with a general subscription to the Timeor as a separate $5 monthly subscription.
Until now, the Time Wordle hasn’t changed much except to give it a new URL and briefly mess up everyone’s stats. (No, it didn’t make the game any harder.) But it started by adding a few nudge around the app to start playing some of the company’s other games… and maybe get a subscription, huh? Apparently it works: in general, the Time said it added 387,000 net digital subscribers last quarter, though it didn’t say how many of those are Wordle players. The Time also offers a special subscription to the cooking content and a general digital package.
Wordle’s virality seems to have declined a bit in recent months as fewer users share their daily scores in group chats and on social media. But that obviously doesn’t mean people have stopped playing. (By the way, I’ve got Wordle from Wednesday in two guesses. Please clap.) And for all the many, many Wordle spin-offs out there, this is definitely a good sign. Maybe Spotify will skyrocket Heardle to squeeze subscriber numbers, and maybe framed is the solution to everything that ails Netflix. worldly could definitely be a feature of Google Maps.
The Time has hinted in the past that it could eventually turn Wordle into a subscriber-only game, but didn’t say anything about its plans during its earnings call. And if the game continues to bring that many people into its ecosystem, the Time might decide it’s better outside the paywall.