Purchase wordle and redirecting the game to its own ends has proven to be great for The New York Times. The media company released its quarterly results on Wednesday and attributed its “best ever quarter for net subscriber additions to Games” directly to the Daily Pun.

wordle hasn’t fallen behind yet the New York Times paywall, but pairing free play with the newspaper’s other subscription games is already paying dividends in the form of new subscribers.

New subscribers — “wordle brought tens of millions of unprecedented new users to The temperature“, The New York Times Society said general manager Meredith Kopit Levien in the report on the results. the Time‘ Games subscription ($5/month for multiple daily games) was indirectly suspended in front of devotees wordle players who have made the jump to the game’s new home, and apparently at least some of them have bitten.

The company now has 9.1 million subscribers to today’s earnings report, many of whom have multiple subscriptions to the various branches of The New York Times multimedia device, whether cooking, gaming or Athleticism.

What could have been – Wordle’s creator Josh Wardle had no intention of turning the game into a full-fledged business, and I don’t blame him for taking his “low seven-figure” payout and getting away with it. And yet I can also imagine a world where wordle remained free, or even began to charge a meager subscription for the basic upkeep of his independence.

It’s not the world we live in though, and if you don’t want to support The New York Times, there are always alternatives.