In the last couple years, the New York Times (NYT) games have become a staple of many people’s morning, mine included, and with the recent boom in popularity, NYT has made development of the games segment a priority. Unfortunately for fans of the ever growing games catalog, the emergence of the games segment as a huge revenue driver for NYT has created an incentive to put up paywalls on whatever possible, and this new price hiking and paywalling policy hit fans hard just a week ago.
On August 26th 2025, many NYT enthusiasts opened up their bookmarked games segment tab only to find the words “Subscribe to play the Mini” stamped on their screen. The tragedy of this event was only compounded by the Tiles gamemode being put behind a paywall as well. For many longtime fans of the NYT games, this came as a shock and hundreds of irate fans took to social media in the aftermath of the paywalling to display their fervent displeasure with NYT on sites such as X, Reddit, and Tik Tok by describing the new policy as a cash grab and criticizing the company executives as being unnecessarily greedy. Beyond just complaining about the policy change, some subscribers made the difficult choice to cancel their subscriptions in protest to the unsavory policy, but this backlash wasn’t a widespread phenomenon, and beyond public criticism, the NYT hasn’t suffered as a result of their choice.
Due to the recency of these events, it’s too soon to tell what the long-term effects will be for the NYT, specifically their games segment subscriptions, but since August 26th, the publicly traded stock has held only suffered a drop of 91 cents down to $58.54, and in a larger time frame the NYT experienced a profit increase of 26.44% to $294 million and a jump in overall revenue of 7.8% up to $2.59 billion in the 2024 fiscal year. Despite the NYT retaining its profit margins in the face of anti-corporate backlash, critics of the change view the paywalling as an unnecessary change that is likely to decrease total subscriptions to the games segment in the long run due to the Mini being a longtime staple and gateway game.
This summer has been a hard one for fans of the NYT games segment, but the recent paywalling of the Mini isn’t a first, and considering the negligible consequences for the company, it probably won’t be the last time that the NYT pulls something like this. In the past 2 years, price hiking has become more common at the NYT with users reporting 60% increases in the cost of their monthly subscriptions from 10$ a month all the way up to 16$ a month, and the NYT subscription page offering a promotional $4 every 4 weeks period followed by a constant pay rate of $25 every 4 weeks.
The latest paywalling has been a massive hit to fans of the ever popular games segment, but considering the lack of significant, widespread backlash, economic soundness of the paywalling and price hiking policy, it’s likely that the NYT will keep on doing this as has been the case since the launch of the iconic Wordle game in 2021.
