The New York Times’ push into games meant a major change for its crosswords app

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

In March, The New York Times made a small but important change to its crosswords app: it dropped the “Crosswords” part of the name in favor of “Games.” It’s a small but important shift that acknowledges how the app has grown from a place to play the crossword into a hub for many of the NYT’s growing library of games.

In addition to the daily crossword, the app now lets you access mini crosswords (“the Mini”), Wordle, a word-spelling game called Spelling Bee, and, as part of some recent updates, sudoku and a visual puzzle game called Tiles. On Tuesday, people who subscribe to the NYT’s Games or All-Access subscriptions will start to get an extra perk: the NYT is rolling out access to the previous two weeks of Spelling Bee puzzles so that subscribers have an archive to chip away at.

“The time just seemed right”

Some may have noticed that the web version of the publication’s games collection switched to the Games branding about three years ago. But with the app, “we sort of held out,” Jonathan Knight, head of games at The New York Times, says in an interview with The Verge. The original crosswords app, which launched in 2009 on iOS, ranked highly on the App Store for the word “crossword.” “We were cautious about messing with that very healthy funnel,” Knight says. The team took a slow approach to bringing more games into the app, and last month, “the time just seemed right” to make the switch from crossword in the name to games.

I started dabbling with the app a few weeks ago when looking for a good place to play sudoku. (By then, it had already switched over