In case anyone is looking for alternatives, my 2-dimensional daily word game (5x5 letters, five words down, five across) is free: https://squareword.org . Not exactly the same as you reveal words with wordle style guesses instead of clues, but might scratch the same itch.
Fortunately the LA Times mini is still free, though the ad-wall can be long (15 seconds).
Struggling to understand the positive business impact this change has, highly doubt anyone is going to pay for it.
no one is paying for this alone. They're paying for everything else, and this is an additional draw/bonus.
People absolutely used to buy (paper) newspapers for the crosswords: they were incredibly sticky and not expensive to make. I don't know whether that still works in an era with tons of free online puzzles, but if the NYT crossword is particularly competent/unusual/good for some reason then I'd not be surprised at all if the crossword sub drove news reading rather than the other way around.
(My experience is more with the British-style cryptic crossword, where every pseudonymous setter has a different 'flavour' and fans have passionate favourite days of the week in a given publication, let alone preferring the Times to the Guardian or whatever. I don't think the American style generates quite such obsessive fandom, but people do love their games...)
Is the NYT crossword so much better than alternatives that it would be worth paying for?
The Mini isn’t. The main one is, at least if you really like crosswords.
Brendan Emmett Quigley releases two free puzzles a week on his site; the New Yorker is free if you don’t let cookies accumulate; the LA Times is ad-supported for nonsubscribers, and the Wall Street Journal is free. I could be forgetting some more free ones.
And there are many subscription-based crossword constructors out there.
The NYT crossword is one of the oldest and certainly the best-known American-style crossword out there; it set many conventions (no isolated letters with no crossing word, 180 degree rotational symmetry) and with Wil Shortz’s becoming editor of the puzzle in the 1990’s changed the vocabulary of crosswords significantly by ditching old, obscure words. They even use mild curses occasionally these days (note: internet-only crosswords often do not censor their language).
Difficulty rises steadily from Monday to Saturday, with Sunday being about a Thursday difficulty but larger. Thursday and Sunday have themes; various forms of wordplay can be found in them, such as rebuses (in the lingo, this means multiple letters in one square even if it’s not an actual rebus-able set of letters), making Wednesday to Thursday one of the hardest leaps for a new solver.
A Saturday NYT is the hardest non-specialist American-style crossword out there. As such, it’s considered the baseline for serious cruciverbalists. If you can’t do them, every week, with no or minimal hints, you will struggle badly with more challenging puzzles.
Yes, each day the game maker creates a timely and relevant crossword. So in this case the person behind it is the loss
Technically, you DON'T need a subscription to play.
I've been working on https://nyt.plus, a site that offers the New York Times mini crossword for free with no paywalls. It also has comprehensive stats-tracking, a global leaderboard, and a puzzles cache with over 300+ NYT Mini puzzles from the past year and a half.
Check it out at https://nyt.plus!!