The next advantage may be what sits behind the game | StickyPuzzles News [← Back to News](https://www.stickypuzzles.com/news)- Weekly Puzzle Digest The next advantage may be what sits behind the game =================================================== October 6, 2026 ![](https://www.stickypuzzles.com/news/the-next-advantage-may-be-what-sits-behind-the-game/content-block-image/105) **Week ending Sunday 4 October 2026** One of the more interesting puzzle launches this week comes from something that is already 50 years old. Arkadium and Fremantle have launched a new browser version of Family Feud with Steve Harvey, including a daily challenge built using real questions from the programme's archive. That caught our attention because it is another example of something we have been circling around for the last few weeks: sometimes the interesting opportunity is not inventing a completely new game, it is finding a new use for something valuable that already exists. Elsewhere, Apple has put another huge puzzle game into Arcade with a different commercial model, more than 140 games were created during a 48-hour AI game jam, and Keesing has appointed a new CEO while talking openly about digital growth and AI. Quite a lot going on, but there is a common thread. As it gets easier to create the game itself, more of the interesting stuff starts happening around it. FIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY FEUD JUST BECAME A DAILY GAME --------------------------------------------------- Family Feud first appeared in 1976. Fifty years later, the new digital version lets people play Classic Duel, Fast Money and Tournament modes on desktop, tablet or mobile, without needing to install anything. The part we liked, though, is the Daily Challenge - it uses genuine questions from the programme's history, turning decades of television content into something people can now come back and play every day. There is something quite satisfying about that. Those questions were originally written for a television programme. Nobody was thinking about daily digital retention when they were created in the 1970s, yet half a century later they have become the raw material for exactly that. ### OUR TAKE Last week we wrote about 442GOALS and the idea that the best game might be one that feels particularly natural for the publisher or brand behind it. Family Feud is a slightly different version of the same thought. A valuable game asset does not always have to be a new concept, or something intrinsically connected with journalism or photographs. It could be a format, a television programme, decades of questions, sporting statistics, characters, personalities or simply something an audience already knows and cares about. That gives you quite a head start. Having worked with TMG and BBC Studios while developing The 1% Club as a digital game, we have seen first-hand that adapting a successful television format is not quite as straightforward as putting the TV show onto a computer screen. There is a careful balance to strike. The IP owner quite rightly wants the experience to feel recognisably like the programme. There may be rules around branding, question style, terminology, presentation and how the format itself can be used. At the same time, those rights and approval processes have usually grown up around the television programme. They do not automatically answer all the questions that appear when somebody is playing alone on a phone, tablet or laptop. - How long should somebody wait? - What happens between questions? - What information does the player actually need on screen? - What feels exciting on television but simply feels slow when you are holding the device yourself? - How much of the television set do you reproduce before it starts becoming decoration rather than useful interface? The temptation is to treat the digital version as a faithful recreation of the TV experience, but often the better challenge is to work out which bits of the television experience are essential to its identity, and which bits need translating for a different medium. There are good examples of that being done well. Jeopardy! PlayShow, for instance, uses actual television episodes, categories, wagers and Daily Doubles, but adapts the experience around the player: your phone becomes part of the interaction, voice recognition lets you answer aloud and party mode turns the living room into the game environment. It is recognisably Jeopardy! without pretending that a console and television are a studio podium. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? also lends itself particularly well to digital because the central experience (one question, four possible answers, a money ladder and lifelines) already works naturally as an individual interaction. The official digital versions keep those recognisable ingredients while adding things such as leaderboards, offline play and other progression around them. That is the real opportunity with established IP - not simply ‘How faithfully can we recreate the television programme?’, but ‘What is it about this programme that people love, and how do we make that work naturally here?’ Get that wrong and you can end up with something that looks authentic but feels awkward to play. Get it right and the digital version can become more than a replica. It can give an established format a completely new way to become part of somebody's routine. And that brings us back to Family Feud. Fifty years of questions are valuable, but it is the combination of recognisable IP + useful archive + appropriate digital mechanic that turns them into a daily product. APPLE HAS DONE IT AGAIN ----------------------- On 1 October, 4 Pics 1 Word+ arrived on Apple Arcade. According to Apple, the original game has been played by more than 400 million people worldwide. The Arcade version does not try to reinvent it. It simply changes the commercial environment around it: no advertising, no in-app purchases, and access as part of the Apple Arcade subscription. There is a bit of déjà vu here - A few weeks ago we wrote about Block Blast!+ doing almost exactly the same thing. One example is interesting. Two within a month begins to look rather more intentional. ### OUR TAKE This is a simple lesson - the same game can work in different commercial settings. It can be free somewhere, advertising-funded somewhere else and part of a subscription somewhere else again. For a publisher, that flexibility matters. You may want a game to introduce somebody to the product, reward an existing subscriber, support a sponsor or simply give somebody another reason to renew. The underlying game may barely change. What changes is the job you are asking it to do. That is increasingly something the platform behind the game needs to handle easily. MORE THAN 140 GAMES IN 48 HOURS ------------------------------- Last week we looked at Meta's Horizon Create and how quickly the gap between “I have an idea” and “I can play something” is shrinking. This week came a slightly different demonstration. Slapjam challenged people to create a playable mobile browser game in just 48 hours, using AI wherever they wanted across code, art, music and other parts of production - more than 140 games were submitted. Now, clearly that does not mean 140 brilliant commercial games suddenly appeared over a weekend, but it does illustrate that a lot more games are no longer just an idea/concept, but far enough developed for someone to try them – and that is the interesting part. ### OUR TAKE Until very recently, if you had ten game ideas, you had to choose which one deserved building, but with the recent AI evolution, you can now build all ten as quick prototypes to find out which one is worth building properly. That changes the question from ‘Can we build it?’ to: - Is it actually any good? - Does somebody understand it? - Do they want another go? - Is there enough in it to still be interesting in six months? - Can an editor actually manage it? - Does it work properly everywhere? - Does it belong in the wider product? That is where AI becomes interesting to us. Not because it allows us to make endless games, but because it allows us to reject weak ideas earlier and spend more time on the good ones. Puzzmo's technical co-founder Orta Therox made a related point this week when writing about how LLMs have changed the way they work. He described game designers and non-engineers being able to build much more themselves, but only because the right technical guardrails and systems sit around that work. That distinction feels important. AI is getting very good at helping people make things, but making sure those things work reliably inside a real product is still another job entirely. ONE OTHER INDUSTRY SIGNAL ------------------------- Keesing also appointed a new CEO this week. Nick Hugh, previously CEO of Telegraph Media Group and more recently at gaming and entertainment advertising technology company Venatus, took over on 1 October. Whilst the appointment itself is not especially interesting to most puzzle players, the language around it is. Keesing's chairman specifically talked about AI, younger audiences moving between print and digital puzzles, and increasing the company's digital footprint. No point trying to predict an entire company strategy from a CEO announcement, but it is another signal that established puzzle businesses increasingly see their future as being about more than supplying the puzzle itself. ### OUR TAKE The puzzle is still the reason somebody turns up – that hasn't changed, but once you have that player, there are plenty of other things that matter. - How easily can the content move between brands? - Can it work across web and app? - Can you change who gets access? - Can an editor manage it without calling a developer? - Can you understand what players actually do? - Can you test a new idea without spending six months building it first? Those capabilities have always formed part of Sticky Puzzles. What is changing is how much more we can potentially learn from them — not simply reporting what happened inside the puzzle but producing useful insights that help publishers understand the wider product and audience. WHAT WE'RE WATCHING THIS WEEK ----------------------------- ### What sits behind the puzzle For a long time, asking what a publisher's puzzle offer looked like was relatively straightforward. It was all about the puzzles - Crossword / Sudoku / Quiz / Word game / The next Wordle Whilst those questions still matter, they are beginning to tell only part of the story. Two publishers could have exactly the same crossword and get very different value from it depending on everything around that crossword. One might publish it on a single web page, another might connect it to accounts, streaks, archive access, subscription, app play, editorial content, personal statistics and useful behavioural data. Same crossword. Very different product. That is why it is no longer just about the games themselves but also in the capability sitting behind them. ### The Bigger Picture There is a strange thing happening in digital puzzles: Making something playable is getting easier, whilst at the same time, making something genuinely useful to a publisher is becoming more complicated. Those things are not contradictory. If AI helps us create more prototypes, great. If archives and existing IP can become new games, even better. If the same game can support several commercial models, that gives publishers much more flexibility, but somebody still has to join all of that together. The content must be good. The experience must work. The player must understand it. The editor needs to be able to run it. The publisher needs to know whether it is doing anything useful - and the whole thing still has to work tomorrow morning when thousands of people turn up expecting today's puzzle to be there That last bit tends not to make the launch announcement, but it is where the value lives, and that is the distinction worth keeping an eye on: Making a game is becoming easier. Building something people can rely on every day is still rather harder. AND FINALLY… CROSSWORD PEOPLE REALLY DO NOTICE EVERYTHING --------------------------------------------------------- Turns out there is a puzzling hobby called ‘Gridspotting’. Crossword enthusiasts identify the actual grids that appear as props in films and television programmes. Vulture wrote about the community this week, including linguist Ben Zimmer, who has been tracking down the origins of puzzles seen on screen. (vulture.com) One investigation involved The Sopranos. You might expect Tony Soprano to be doing the Star-Ledger crossword, but apparently not, the gridspotters worked out that the puzzle shown on screen actually came from the Courier News. This hobby has grown to the point where there is now a Discord community comparing finds, and work is underway on a database of identified television and film grids, including fake crossword grids and repeated stock props. Anyone working within puzzles will not be surprised by that. Puzzlers notice – whether it be clue wording, buttons moving, publishing times changing and even when Tony Soprano has picked up the wrong crossword. ### Further reading - [Arkadium: Family Feud with Steve Harvey](https://corporate.arkadium.com/newsroom/arkadium-and-fremantle-build-on-their-partnership-with-a-new-family-feud-game) - [Apple: 4 Pics 1 Word+ joins Apple Arcade](https://www.apple.com/ie/newsroom/2026/09/the-internets-favorite-cat-comes-to-apple-arcade-with-pusheens-place/) - [Slapjam: AI Game Jam](https://slapjam.ai) - [Puzzmo: Re-evaluating engineering principles in a post-LLM world](https://blog.puzzmo.com/posts/2026/09/28/re-evaluating-principles/) - [Keesing: Nick Hugh appointed CEO](https://www.keesing.com/keesing-appoints-nick-hugh-as-ceo) - [Vulture: Where Did Tony Soprano Get His Crosswords?](https://www.vulture.com/article/crossword-puzzle-sleuths-movies-tv-gridspotting.html) - [Jeopardy!: PlayShow](https://www.jeopardy.com/play/playshow) - [Sony Pictures: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?](https://www.sonypictures.com/games/whowantstobeamillionaire) **\#StickyPuzzles #DigitalPublishing #Puzzles #AudienceEngagement #GameDesign #AI #ProductInnovation** - Sticky Puzzle - The business of Puzzles [← Back to News](https://www.stickypuzzles.com/news)