The Secret Behind Your NYT Games Addiction

0:01Neal Freyman:Marketers, tell us if this sounds familiar. You invest in something that seems incredible like millions of views, but then don't see any revenue. Instead, invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a$250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com slash mbd. That's linkedin.com slash mbd. Terms and conditions apply.

0:32Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, what's behind your New York Times games addiction?

0:39Neal Freyman:We talked to the guy in charge of it all to find out the secret sauce. It's Monday, September 7th. Let's ride.

0:51Happy Labor Day, everyone. With the office closed today, we are bringing you a special holiday interview episode. So if you're anything like us, your morning group chats have changed from actual conversation to a sea of green, yellow and gray squares. Wordle, connections, the many, spelling bee, doing New York Times puzzles has turned into a daily ritual for millions of people.

1:14Neal Freyman:So how did that happen? And maybe more importantly, what makes a game a New York Times game? To find out, we spoke to Jonathan Knight, the head of games at the New York Times. He spent his career obsessed with games, including stops at EA in Zynga, before taking over a portfolio that now includes some of the most recognizable brain busters on the internet. We talked about the puzzle revolution, how the Times decides which games make the cut, and the story behind acquiring Wordle. But before we get to the interview, a quick word from our sponsor, Hotels.com. How was your last business trip, Neil?

1:49Bad. I had to stay in a yurt with 14 other dudes.

1:52Neal Freyman:Sounds like you could use business preferences from Hotels.com. It helps travelers find the right hotel faster by remembering their go-to work trip requirements. Travelers set their preferences once, including fully refundable stays, Wi-Fi, breakfast, gym access, and more. Then future business trip searches automatically surface matching hotels. That way you can book work trips faster. Just set your preferences once and get results tailored to your business travel needs. Plus, get up to 20 % off select hotels instantly with member discounts and earn rewards for future travel. Sign up for their free rewards program and start earning on every work stay at hotels.com slash morningbrew.

2:32That's hotels.com slash morningbrew. Loyalty members 18 plus.

2:38Neal Freyman:Now, here's our conversation with New York Times head of games, Jonathan Knight. Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us and sorry to interrupt your wordle playing. That's all right. I'll get back to it. Thank you. Good to be here. All right. So I have currently about seven different group chats where people send their daily puzzle scores across a bunch of different games. Those did not exist five years ago, those group chats. Why seemingly all of a sudden is everyone so into puzzles? Well, yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, we've obviously at the New York Times been in the puzzle business for a very long time.

3:11So it doesn't seem like all of a sudden to us when you kind of zoom out for the historical perspective. We ran our first crossword puzzle in 1942. And, you know, it's a great story because it was, you know, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And the paper felt, hey, let's give people something to kind of take their mind off of a rough news cycle. And thus the Sunday crossword was born. And so we've been publishing puzzles for a very long time. I do think that with the acquisition of Wordle, which came in 2022, you know, it was a moment and it was COVID. It was sort of back half of COVID and people were exhausted and divided.

3:50And along comes this just adorable game that kind of brings everybody together. And, you know, it had a very clever sort of sharing mechanic that people started to use in their group chats. And then, yeah, they form these little micro social networks with family and friends. And because the game's so good, people come back to it every day. And because it's a social moment, then it kind of keeps it going as well. So, yeah, we're like thrilled. It's been kind of an incredible phenomenon. But it can't just be COVID. I mean, we can go outside now and people are still playing games. So I don't know exactly what it is.

4:29There has maybe COVID was an inflection point for a variety of games and maybe Wordle was the catalyst. But there's something super sticky about these games now in 2026 when you can also hang out with your friends and do a bunch of other things besides playing games that it's had such remarkable staying power and expanded into a lot of different types of puzzles. Yeah, that's totally right. I think, yeah, catalyst is a good word, right? So we've been at this for a long time. But the crosswords, you know, are not for everyone. They can be, as we were just discussing before we started, they can be hard.

5:02They can take a long time. you can get better at them, but it is a little bit of an investment. And we're really proud of our crossword offering. But I think Wordle did sort of, you know, blow the doors open on that sort of daily puzzle phenomenon and brought it to tens of millions of people. But I would say the core concept is the same, which is, it's a daily puzzle. It's made by real people at the New York Times, and that really matters. It's the same puzzle every day for all of us. So we're all trying to kind of solve that same, whether it's like the Wordle of the day or it's that Sunday crossword.

5:38We can say, hey, did you do the Sunday today? Oh, yeah, it was really hard. Or, hey, did you get Wordle today? Oh, I got it in two. And it's a shared experience. And it sounds simple, but most games don't work that way. You know, we might be playing Candy Crush Saga together. You might be on level 9622, and I might be on level 360. you know we're having a kind of shared experience we both love the product but our daily experiences are very different but for us the content is the same for everyone whether you started Wordle yesterday or you've been playing for five years so that I think also just makes it a shared you know experience you know I also happen to think that our product is very elegant high quality it's you know we we are respectful of users and and respectful of their time the game isn't nagging you it's not shouting at you it's um it's classy and because of that I think people are more proud to talk about their habit with us and and to share with others and we see even celebrities sharing you know their stories about playing our games and that's because they're they're proud of it they identify with it and um so I think we're doing a lot of things right so you obviously have

6:49Neal Freyman:a lot of very successful games under the New York Times umbrella, but some games have failed to take off. I'm thinking specifically like digits. What have you observed or what have you noticed on what makes a game successful versus what makes a game less successful? Yeah. Great question. And digits is not the only, um, you know, game that we've tested with users that we decided not to go forward with. Um, digits is near and dear to my heart. We really love that puzzle. We tried a couple times. And look, we just have a very high bar. I think when we introduce a new game, we intend to support it for a long time.

7:30It requires real humans to make the puzzles every day. And so any puzzle we add to the portfolio is just a real cost and investment, and we want to do it well. So we're very thorough about our green light process. And we have lots of concepts that come in. They come in from all over the place. The team is constantly pitching new puzzle ideas. And we run them through a rigorous kind of phase gate process with the concept committee, a green light committee, all of that. And ultimately test with users, get feedback, do beta tests, look at retention. And then, you know, we just have a high bar. And if it doesn't make it, we try to make a decision quick to cut it and move on to something else.

8:14And that's just part of the process. Are there specific criteria you look for when adding a new game to the portfolio? Like, do you have a checklist that says it has to be made by a human, it has to do X, Y, and Z? Like, is there, when you look at a new game, do you think to yourself, this is a New York Times game and this is not a New York Times game? Absolutely. We have that conversation. I might describe it as filters versus a checklist. We have these filters that we put the concepts through, and I would say, hey, is it editorially driven? Does it have real humans behind it? Do we feel like the daily content would be fresh and inspiring and clever and all of that?

8:53But, you know, do we think it's going to be a good use of people's time? Like, will it fit into their daily life? You know, does it do we think people would share it? You know, all of these things go into that kind of aesthetic. And I think also, you know, we're not going to do a racing game or a shooter, you know. So there's like, hey, is it a daily solve? You know, puzzles are meant to be solved. Games are just played. You know, those kinds of conversations for sure happen. you know the real once we sort of get further along and we have something that we can put out as a beta then we're really looking at return rates or retention and we're sort of getting just like very rigorous and objective about you know are people coming back not just the next day or the third day or the seventh day but are they coming back 30 days later 60 days later is it really habit forming.

9:49And that's a very high bar. We look at a lot of things that are clever and like, would you do them two or three times? Absolutely. You know, and it's hard to say no to those things because they just look great and they're fun and you do them a few times, but would you come back a month later every day? It's just a much higher bar.

10:05Neal Freyman:Do you look at it as buckets where you say we have a lot of really great language games? Let's add in some more great math games or some more visual games. Because one thing that we're pretty obsessed with right now is geography-based games. I don't know if you've heard of a game called Map Tap, where you just are tapping a globe. So do you ever look at it in segments like that as like, oh, we could probably branch into the geography world? Or is it just on the merits, on if it's a good game or not? No, 100 % we do. And I'm fortunate that we've got a research team. You know, Juliet is our research lead, and they really help us understand categories, segments, opportunity size for these things.

10:45Word puzzles, it's a very big category, a sort of subcategory of puzzle game. And so we've been fortunate to kind of have a lead in the word category. You know, the App Store categorizes these things, and so it does matter. You know, and also we want to have a well-rounded portfolio. So for example, we introduced Pips not long ago, which is a logic puzzle, and it uses dominoes to, you rotate the dominoes and you place him in a certain pattern to meet certain requirements on the board. And it's a visual logic puzzle and it doesn't require you to know anything about the English language. And that was intentional.

11:22We've got tiles, we've got a Sudoku. So we want to make sure our logic puzzle offering is robust. And yeah, that leads us to think about other kinds of categories within the overall puzzle genre.

11:35Neal Freyman:One of the most powerful features about Wordle is that little emoji shareable text that you can send to your family group chats. When you saw that, was that an aha moment that Wordle was doing this or was that just standard game design? Because that to me feels like the most powerful shareability aspect. Was that like a learning moment for the industry? It was totally a learning moment. It was a learning moment for us. And we've, you know, followed that model with connections and with strands and we've liked to, and, you know, we've had a lot of fun with the emoji share. We'll do things now where like on Halloween, you know, the emoji shares changed for just one day and there's little pumpkins in there or whatever.

12:14So, you know, we've internalized that. I consider that to be a feature of the game. And I often talk about, um, those group chats, you know, whether it's in WhatsApp or whatever messenger app you're using to share, you know, that surface, I feel like that's like the other half of our product experience. You know, we don't own that real estate, you know, we're there kind of rent-free, but we really care about what that's like. And we don't want to junk that experience up with a lot of links or things that would just make it not be the same kind of thing you would expect coming from our actual product.

12:50But we have experimented with that and tried to have fun with it. There's no question that that was something that Wordle uniquely did at a unique moment in time. And I would say, you know, remember, that was also like peak Twitter, like Twitter was never the same after that sort of era. And I don't know that that could ever happen again. You know, our social networks have become fragmented. And, you know, you'd feel like you were jumping the shark if you tried to like replicate the wordle share. So I do think it was special. And it's interesting that story, it wasn't even in the original product, It was a user somewhere in New Zealand, I think, who wanted to share her Wordle experience and came up with this idea of, well, let me just share the grid but without the solution so that I'm not spoiling it.

13:40But it's my little story of how I solved the Wordle. And Josh Wardle, the creator of the game, sort of incorporated that early on into the experience. So I would say it was even like a community feature. And so very difficult to kind of replicate, I think, that kind of explosive virality. I do think it's like a once in a generation moment.

14:01Neal Freyman:I think it's so funny too how sacred it is because you can edit it. You know, it is literally a text message you can edit and yet no one does. There has, there's this aura of untouchability to it. And I love that. I love that collectively we have enough trust in each other that we respect to the Wordle emoji shareability. Well, have you seen those interviews with Carol Burnett and Julia Louis-Dreyfus? and they're in it and Charlize Theron they're all in a group chat together and they do Whirl every day but Charlize Theron and Julie Louis-Dreyfus have begun to accuse Carol Burnett of cheating and it plays out on the talk shows it's really funny because apparently she's gotten Whirl in one like seven times and nobody buys it that's not possible yeah not possible alright so I think I'm channeling maybe the frustrations of a lot of New York Times games players in asking this question how much do you think Think about rage bait as a driver of engagement.

14:58By that, I mean an obvious missing word in spelling bee, an especially obscure answer in Wordle, a fiendish category in Connections. Because when those happens, that's where you start to see the discussion and you see these games percolate into social media. Is that a strategy that you guys deploy? It is intentional from the standpoint of our editors are, Well, you listed a lot of puzzles there and different answer for different puzzles. But the editors are keen on fresh, surprising, fun, sometimes twisted, sometimes challenging, sometimes devious puzzles every day. And that's their job is to entertain people.

15:42And, you know, when you solve a New York Times puzzle, you're not just solving any puzzle. You're sort of like it's this feeling of accomplishment. Like I beat those, you know, those tricksters, you know, in Manhattan. Like I'm smarter than them. And that's a feeling that speaks to our brand as well. So absolutely. But I think like I would say connections, the purple category, intentionally devious, misdirects. That's the nature of that puzzle. And Winnaloo is just a mastermind at that. And she took to it immediately. And it's just like very difficult to imagine a different editor doing what she did.

16:21I think with Wordle, Tracy Bennett is very thoughtful about the sort of cadence of the, you know, the easier ones, the hard ones, the waterfalls where it just like is a tower of green and you can't get like she thinks about all of that. And, you know, with Spelling Bee, look, Sam Azersky has a lot of fun going online and debating with people, the hive mind about whether that word should or shouldn't have been included. At the end of the day, he's actually not, I think, trying to be devious or frustrating. I think he's trying to create a well-balanced experience where you feel like you can get to genius and that there isn't some word that's so obscure that you would never get it that's sort of keeping you from getting to the rank.

17:02But then for another person, that might not be an obscure word. It's like, hey, you know, that's a relatively real word and I knew it and it didn't acknowledge it for me. And so I'm frustrated. So that's, you know, it's a balance there. And I think he's just always trying to strike that balance.

17:16Neal Freyman:I love when it does break through into the discourse because the recent one that just happened was Pshaw Gate. I don't know if you this made the way through the company, but P-S-H-A-W was the Wordle word. And I just opened Twitter and it felt like, you know, 2022 again, where everyone's like, God dang it, like Wordle, you just ruined my entire morning. And it just broke through the discourse again. But I like when that happened because it makes me feel like everyone's collectively, you in the same arena once more, but Peshawgate was the most recent one that I can think of. We'll be back with more Jonathan Knight right after this.

17:53Neal Freyman:Neil, you're late. I was here before you today. That might be so, but every day you're late to AI, you fall two days behind. NetSuite Next from Oracle helps you catch up. Their latest expert-created free guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era, explores how AI could reshape work across your entire organization and how to position your business so it can prosper from it. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide at netsuite.com slash brew. That's netsuite.com slash brew. Capturing value in fixed income is tough. How tough is it? Toby, that wasn't a setup.

18:31Bond markets are massive and murky.

18:34Neal Freyman:Well then, I guess it's a good thing Vanguard bonds are institutional quality. Their lineup includes over 80 bond funds. Vanguard focuses on reliability and consistency. It's not always flashy, but it sets the standard for what dependable investing should look like. See the record for yourself at Vanguard.com slash audio. That's Vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. Meet Amazon Ads rising star Daryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand Crown Skin. Amazon Ads helped him grow. I walked away from big tech to build a luxury brand.

19:10Neal Freyman:in a category that no one was paying attention to. With the help of Amazon ads, I'm reaching relevant audiences and competing with the biggest names in men's grooming. We've scaled to over$500 ,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars. I also think in this line of questioning where it feels like you, the player, versus the New York Times editors. And I have seen your social strategy kind of adopt this where a lot more of your editors are becoming personalities. People know them by name. They're in front of the camera. They're playing the game sometimes or playing against each other.

19:52Neal Freyman:How are you thinking about turning these editors who would normally be behind the scenes into almost front-facing social media personalities? Yeah, I'm so thrilled that that's happening and they're having so much fun with it. I think, you know, it's a little cliche, but like more than ever in this day and age where people are maybe struggling to figure out if content is AI generated or human generated, we are like intentionally leaning into the human made nature of what we do. We're investing in our editorial team. We're so proud of them. We want to promote them. We're doing more to actually showcase this in the product, and you'll see that coming in the coming months.

20:38And this is part of our strategy, for sure, to not only lean into the human-made nature of our puzzles, but to also let people know and make sure they know that these are really made by very talented, creative, clever editors and constructors. Have you ever thought about launching a podcast? We don't have any plans for that. I think we have talked about a lot of different ways in which we could reach audiences through different media. We just announced a collaboration with NBC to bring Wordle to television as a game show. I think that's going to be really exciting. I think if we felt that a podcast or other media could get the word out and help us reach more people, we would pursue it.

21:22But right now, I think we've got a lot still to do with the Instagram channel and sort of growing that. It's getting a lot of traction. I'm glad you mentioned it. So I think we're focused on keeping our eye on the ball there and the TV show. And, you know, we'll see what next year brings.

21:38Neal Freyman:Was that volunteering us, Neil? Because I'll do it more than a pot. It was actually a very innocent question. But since you brought it up, yeah, sure, I'll do the crossword one. Absolutely. I wonder, too, about what it feels like to work in the games division at this broader company that is the New York Times that is ostensibly a news business. But over recent years, subscription revenue from games has overtaken the news business in terms of what it contributes to the bottom line of the company. Do you feel any sort of pressure because of that? Does it feel different than that you know that you are a major moneymaker for this very historic news organization?