The news x games collab is going strong

Last week, The Washington Post released On the Record, a trivia game that asks users one quote-based question per day, Monday through Thursday. It concludes with a ten-question finale on Friday.

🎲📰 Games? In the news?... WaPo’s launch of On the Record comes less than a year after the viral rise of Wordle, a guess-the-word game that grew from less than 100 players per day in November 2021 to a millions of daily users by February 2022.

This attracted the attention of the NY Times. And just like the Godfather himself, they made Wordle’s creator Josh Wardle an offer he couldn’t refuse, acquiring the game in early 2022 for an undisclosed sum “in the low seven figures.”

📈 And so far, so good. About three months after the acquisition, the NY Times announced its purchase of the game brought “an unprecedented tens of millions of new users to The Times.” Which helped drive the company’s best quarter ever for net subscriber additions to its Games offering.

• 44% of Americans play Wordle regularly, according to a recent WordFinder report. That’s more than the 37% of Americans who have a passport.

🖼️ Big picture: If On the Record can bring even a fraction of the traffic as Wordle, it would be a success; 2022 wasn’t so good to the Washington Post. The Jeff Bezos-owned publication ended last year with 2.5 million subscribers, down half a million from 2021.