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On Wednesday, The New York Times launched its eleventh game, a multiplayer wordplay contest called Crossplay.
The release is the latest in a steady drumbeat of new diversions to emerge from The Times’ Games division, which has become the largest ad surface by reach across The Times’ portfolio since its launch in 2020, according to chief revenue officer Joy Robins.
“It’s a new way to play,” Robins said. “It’s faster, more social, and designed for head-to-head competition, and we think it will welcome more of the population into The New York Times’ Games.”
In 2025, users solved more than 11 billion puzzles, and tens of millions of people visited daily to try their hand at Wordle, the Crossword, and Connections, among others, per Robins. Games has also proven a commercial success, attracting more than 1,700 advertisers since its inception and enticing normally news-averse brands to work with the publisher.
Indeed, the runaway success of the platform has led industry insiders to quip that The Times is actually a games company with a side hustle in news. The publisher, of course, downplays the joke, but its latest launch further illustrates just how plausible the punchline has become.
Crossplay’s gameplay combines the linguistic challenge of Scrabble with the interactive dynamic of Words with Friends.
With the game’s debut, The Times marks two notable firsts: Crossplay will be a standalone app rather than part of the standard Games product, and it will also be the first multiplayer game developed by The Times.
Launching as a standalone app is primarily to support specific features offered in the game, according to Robins, but it is also interesting for a number of other reasons. For one, Crossplay does not require a New York Times subscription to play, just a login.
