The Lockdown Boom
In March 2020 much of the world was sent home and told to find something to do. A great deal has been written about what that did to the crossword, and most of it stops at the good bit.
The surge was real. It was the largest the puzzle had seen since the mania of 1924. It also wore off far faster than the coverage suggests, and the thing that rescued the numbers afterwards was not the pandemic.
The numbers were real
At the end of 2019 the New York Times had 600,000 subscriptions to its Crossword. A year later its chief financial officer, Roland Caputo, told an earnings call the company had "nearly 850,000 games subscriptions". By December 2021 it had a million.
That's 42 per cent growth in the pandemic year. The quarterly figures show it arriving in real time: net additions from Cooking, Crossword and audio ran 119,000, then 176,000, then 118,000, then 202,000 across the four quarters of 2020. The company added 2.3 million net digital subscriptions that year, a record it still hasn't beaten.
The physical trade moved harder still. American jigsaw sales rose 228 per cent in the week ending 21 March 2020 against the same week a year earlier. Across the full year, US puzzle sales rose 55 per cent to $405 million.
One small detail dates the moment precisely. In May 2020, mid-surge, the Times renamed its Crossword product Games.
Then it wore off
Here's the part that doesn't get printed.
Those 202,000 net additions in the last quarter of 2020 fell to 134,000 in the first quarter of 2021, and to 65,000 in the second. Two-thirds of the surge was gone inside six months. By mid-2021 the puzzle boom, as a growth story, was finished.
Two-thirds of the surge was gone inside six months. What came next was not a recovery. It was a purchase.
What actually saved it
On 31 January 2022 the Times bought Wordle for a sum it described as the low seven figures. Its creator, Josh Wardle, said the game had gone from 90 daily players on 1 November 2021 to more than 300,000 by 2 January.
The Times went on to call the following quarter the best it had ever had for net subscriber additions to Games. That was twenty-two months after the first lockdown. The second boom was an acquisition, not an emergency.
The jigsaws went away
The physical side didn't hold at all. The US toy industry grew 17 per cent in 2020 and 14 per cent in 2021, then fell 0.2 per cent in 2022. Ravensburger, which had reported unprecedented demand in 2020, saw group revenue fall from €636 million to €598 million between 2021 and 2022.
People bought a jigsaw in lockdown. Most of them didn't buy another.
What the boom was worth
The migration was permanent, but it was cheap. Across 2025 the Times grew its single-product subscribers - Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, Audio - from 3.45 million to 4.27 million, while news-only subscribers fell from 1.93 million to 1.47 million.
Those single-product subscribers generate average revenue of $3.36 each. A news subscriber generates $13.33.
So the puzzle audience is now comfortably larger than the news audience and worth about a quarter as much per head. That's the shape of what lockdown handed the industry: a great many more people, paying a great deal less, and staying.
Five years on, 2020 remains the Times's best year ever for digital subscriptions. Its chief executive, reporting a strong 2022, could only place it "behind only 2020".
The lockdown did not create solvers. It handed the ones already there an unlimited supply of the only thing a crossword really costs, which is time.