Should Publishers Build Their Own Games?

The short answer is: usually not from scratch.

The better question is what a publisher must own when it adds online games to its audience engagement strategy.

Why do games matter to publisher audience engagement?

Games have become strategically important to media. The New York Times Company's 2025 annual report describes Games as part of a broader portfolio that helped the company reach 12.8 million subscribers by the end of 2025, and links strong portfolio engagement across News, The Athletic, Cooking, Games and Wirecutter with commercial growth. The success is real.

The dangerous conclusion is that every publisher should therefore become a games studio.

The Times did not obtain the value of games simply by commissioning some code. It built a long-term product capability: editorial judgement, daily production, design, testing, distribution, identity, subscriptions, analytics and continuous improvement. The visible puzzle is only the top layer. Underneath it sits an operating system for habit.

Why is building a game different from operating a publisher games platform?

That distinction matters. A game can be launched in a few months. A reliable games proposition has to be operated every day.

It needs fresh content, multi-device quality assurance, accessibility, consent management, analytics, ad integration, account logic, customer support, localisation and live maintenance. It needs someone to know why players abandon level three, why one browser suddenly produces a rendering fault, why a rewarded ad is reducing rather than improving retention, and why yesterday's popular quiz failed to bring people back today.

Buying or building a game is therefore not the real strategic decision. The decision is whether the organisation wants to create and sustain all of that capability itself.

For a small number of publishers, the answer should be yes. A publisher with distinctive intellectual property, a large addressable audience, strong product leadership and the budget to maintain a permanent games team may gain an advantage from developing a proprietary title. If the mechanic itself is central to the brand, owning the underlying product can make sense.

But this is the exception, not the default.

Most publishers do not need to own a rendering engine. They need to own the outcome. Those are different things.

What should a publisher own?

The valuable assets are the relationship with the player, the first-party data generated with consent, the editorial and commercial rules, the placement and promotion, the brand experience, and the ability to decide what happens next. None of those requires the publisher to rebuild commodity infrastructure or carry the cost of maintaining every game across an unpredictable device landscape.

There is a more useful way to divide control.

A publisher should own:

·      the audience promise;

·      the brand and editorial fit;

·      the first-party relationship and consent framework;

·      the commercial model;

·      the success measures;

·      the decision about which experiences are free, registered or premium.

A specialist games partner can supply:

·      proven game formats and reusable engines;

·      daily content operations;

·      device, browser and accessibility testing;

·      identity, leaderboard and community components;

·      monetisation and measurement plumbing;

·      the live optimisation needed after launch.

This is not surrendering control. It is separating strategic control from industrial production.

What is the smarter build-vs-buy model for games for publishers?

The same logic already exists elsewhere in publishing. News organisations do not build their own cloud infrastructure, payment rails or video codecs simply because those technologies are important. They choose systems that let them control the audience experience without recreating the entire technical stack.

Games should be treated with the same maturity.

The strongest approach is often to start with a portfolio, observe what the audience actually does, and build selectively where the evidence justifies it. A publisher may discover that local trivia creates daily return, that a word game is unusually effective at registration, or that a sports prediction format produces sponsor demand. That is the moment to deepen investment - after behaviour has revealed the opportunity.

Starting with a large bespoke build reverses that logic. It places capital before learning and makes the first concept carry the weight of the whole strategy. If the mechanic misses, the organisation may conclude that games do not work when the real failure was concentration risk.

The question, then, is not "build or buy?" It is "what must we genuinely own?"

Publishers should own their audience, their data, their standards and their strategic intent. They should be much less sentimental about owning the undifferentiated machinery beneath them.

The future belongs to media organisations that can create reasons to return without creating a new technical department for every reason. The smartest games strategy does not turn a publisher into a games company. It gives the publisher a dependable games capability.

Sources: The New York Times Company 2025 Annual Report