It also represents just the fifth app in The New York Times family, alongside the flagship app, The Athletic, Cooking, and Games itself. The Times is loath to launch extraneous apps. When it introduced the Audio app in 2023, the launch marked the first new standalone release the publisher had debuted in nine years. (Two years later, it closed the product and folded audio more prominently into its flagship app.)
Crossplay is also, obviously, a mobile game, which if nothing else marks an important symbolic shift from its predecessors. The company is no longer, as they might say on TikTok, beating the “games company” allegations. The division more broadly is integral to The Times’ increasing focus on its “bundled” subscription, which now accounts for more than half its total subscribers, per its latest quarterly earnings.
In addition to the design considerations, launching Crossplay as a standalone product enables The Times to market it more aggressively in the App Store, Robins said. This will help it reach new audiences by searching for customers in a different ecosystem, exposing The Times’ brand to new cohorts, according to media analyst Kerri Mason.
While The Times will promote Crossplay across a variety of channels, optimizing it for the App Store also enables the publisher to bypass the increasingly complex world of search advertising, which has been disrupted by artificial intelligence. Like cooking apps (coincidentally, another strength of The Times), gaming apps exist largely untethered from the open web, whose future has grown uncertain as a result of answer engines.
In short, as the open web and search become unreliable sources of acquisition, The Times has avoided the issue by creating a product designed for discovery in an entirely different ecosystem.
The other novel element of Crossplay is that it marks the first two-player game created by The Times. This enables all kinds of new features, such as an in-game chat, but it also makes distribution more seamless, according to Mason.
The social nature of the game encourages users to share it with their friends, whether or not they are Times habitués. This natural incentive will help it spread more quickly to new audiences, which could have a compounding effect given that the app is already being promoted in a new ecosystem to a new cohort of prospective users.
To keep the barrier to entry minimal, Crossplay will be free to play—at least at first. In a novel but related twist, the game will also be the first from The Times to feature ads within gameplay itself, rather than before or after the session begins. According to Robins, users will get their first ad after seven turns, then every three turns after that. J.P. Morgan Chase is the launch sponsor.
