Zach Gage’s Puzzmo gets acquired as the newspaper games space heats up

04.12.2023 - 19:52 / theverge.com / Andrew Webster / Space

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

The battle over newspaper-style puzzle games is intensifying. Hearst — which publishes the likes of Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and the San Francisco Chronicle — has announced that it has acquired Puzzmo, a puzzle gaming platform led by indie developers Zach Gage and Orta Therox. The move puts Hearst directly up against the gaming efforts of The New York Times. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As a comparison, in 2022 The New York Times acquired Wordle for “an undisclosed price in the low seven figures.”

Puzzmo launched in a limited beta form in October and is billed as a reimagining of the classic newspaper games page. It features a number of notable Gage-designed titles like SpellTower, Really Bad Chess, and Typeshift, along with a streamlined daily crossword puzzle. The site also features community features like leaderboards and multiplayer options. “There’s great stuff out there,” Gage told me in October of the newspaper games space. “But there isn’t this holistic place where people can go and build a community around these games.”

As part of the deal, Gage and Therox will continue to develop Puzzmo, which currently operates as a website, with a mobile app in the works. But Puzzmo will also begin rolling out to readers of more than 50 Hearst publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Popular Mechanics.

Additionally, Hearst will be licensing out Puzzmo games to other publishers. According to the company, these deals “are structured as rev-shares on both subscription and advertising revenue.” Each publisher gets a branded version of the Puzzmo site, complete with the same library of games. (In a press release, Hearst explains that “The platform includes zero-code tools for publishers outside of Hearst’s network to tailor Puzzmo’s look and feel, settings, games, and paywall to their unique needs.”)

To start, the list of publishers licensing the service include the likes of Digg, Postmedia, and Polygon (which, disclosure, is part of Vox Media alongside The Verge).

“The power, flexibility, and scalability of what we’ve built makes it a smart choice for publishers, and we’re excited to reach so many players across Hearst’s audience,” Therox said in a statement.

The move puts Hearst in direct competition with The New York Times, which has been making a concerted effort to expand its presence in the gaming space. This started with the acquisition of viral word game Wordle in 2022, which has continued to live on as part of the paper’s growing library of games. Since then it has rolled out a revamped app and a few more