I’ve been working on and off in the games industry for 27 years. So it should come as no surprise that the first company out of my reverse incubator is a games company.
Today I’m announcing GreatGamesNetwork, a company focused on building and publishing evergreen casual puzzle games. The core audience is older women, the demographic that plays most frequently and retains longest in casual gaming. It’s also one of the most competitive markets in games.
Why puzzle games
Here’s the pattern I’m betting on.
There are 3.3 billion gamers worldwide, and puzzle games are the most popular mobile genre with over 60% of players in the US and UK.
The audience is specific. Puzzle game players skew female and skew older. Women spend ~19 minutes a day on puzzle games. Puzzle games retain players at over twice the rate of mobile games overall. They find something they like and they stay.
Evergreen puzzle games are the perfect product for this audience. No content treadmill, no seasonal updates. If you can build an audience that plays your games, you can generate value forever.
The model: one game library, many destinations
GreatGamesNetwork isn’t a single website or app. It’s a puzzle game company that builds premium games and publishes them through different products for different types of players.
The same Solitaire game can live inside a daily challenge product, an SEO-optimized destination for people searching Google for “solitaire,” or even a saga-style progression game where you advance through levels on a map. Each product has its own audience, its own business model, and its own distribution. But the games underneath are the same engine and catalog.
Build the games once, distribute them everywhere. That’s the bet.
Why I can compete
So why do I believe I can enter one of the most competitive markets in games?
Syndication changes the math. Most puzzle companies build for one platform and need to win big there to survive. GreatGamesNetwork aggregates many small revenue streams into real revenue at almost no overhead. The cost of deploying a game to a new destination is close to zero. I don’t need to beat anyone on any single platform. I need to show up everywhere.
Narrow focus compounds. Every game targets the same audience. Every destination serves the same player. A new game immediately works across every existing destination. A new destination immediately has access to the full catalog. The tooling and the audience data compound because nothing is wasted on a different genre or a different demographic.
I know this market. I’ve spent most of my career in casual games. I have a clear understanding of what retains, what monetizes, and what “good” looks like in this space. The job isn’t to figure out the playbook. It’s to execute it.
Discovery is being reset. For twenty years, finding puzzle games meant Google and the app stores. Incumbents built SEO moats and review counts that took years to accumulate. New entrants couldn’t touch them. That’s changing. When someone asks an AI “what’s a good daily solitaire game,” the answer isn’t determined by fifteen years of backlinks. Nobody has figured out AI search optimization yet. That’s a window, and I intend to be in it.
Growth costs money. None of this reaches hyperscale without paid user acquisition. Organic gets you started. Paid gets you big. I’ve spent millions of dollars buying ads for games like these and have experience scaling game companies through cost-positive UA. That’s not common for a solo founder and it matters here.
The playbook is repeatable. Everything I’m building here, the syndication model, the game catalog, the acquisition engine, the tooling, is designed to work as a system, not as a one-person operation. Every process gets turned into tooling. The playbook isn’t a document. It’s software.
The catalog
The catalog will be a mix of evergreen titles like Solitaire, Sudoku, and Mahjong, and original games unique to GreatGamesNetwork where I’m attempting to build new evergreens.
Three games are live today.
Solitaire is Klondike Solitaire with a twist: every player gets the same deal each day. Build the four foundation piles from Ace to King to win.
Sudoku is the world’s most popular logic puzzle. Fill the 9x9 grid so every row, column, and 3x3 box contains 1 through 9. No math required, just reasoning.
WordSlip is my first original game. A daily word puzzle on a hexagonal grid. Seven letters are scattered across the cells. Figure out the word, then drag a path through every cell on the board, hitting the fixed letters in order.
More games are in development. The goal is a focused catalog of high-quality games, not a bloated library.
DailyPlay.com
The first destination is DailyPlay.com, a daily puzzle platform in the style of NYT Games. NYT Games alone has over a million subscribers and over 10 million daily players. Wordle alone averages 4 million daily players. The model is validated at massive scale. Even LinkedIn launched daily puzzle games in 2024 to drive daily engagement. This is a format that everyone is betting on right now.
Fresh puzzle every day, same puzzle for all players. Three games at launch: Solitaire, Sudoku, and WordSlip.
DailyPlay is ad-free. Not “ad-free for subscribers.” No ads for anyone, ever. Search for “solitaire” right now and you’ll find a wall of ad-stuffed sites layered with pop-ups and autoplay video. The audience has been drowning in that for twenty years. DailyPlay is the opposite, respecting the players.
Subscriptions are $3 a month or $25 a year. Same price as NYT Games on its own. Free users get today’s daily puzzle. Subscribers get full archives, detailed stats, and everything that comes next.
What I’m working on
Sound and music. Native mobile apps. Syndication across distribution platforms. I’ve completed nine games but only shipped three because the others are simply not good enough. The overall level of finish isn’t where I want it to be yet.
I know what “great” looks like. I need real players and real data to get there. The games work, the infrastructure is solid. Now it’s about iteration.
What you can expect
I’ll publish real numbers on how GreatGamesNetwork is doing: revenue, subscribers, retention, what’s working, what’s failing. Same transparency as my last startup blog. Same accountability.
If you want to follow along, subscribe. If you want to play, go play.
How do you know when a game is 'good enough'? It seems you have the 'recipe'. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. I find it difficult to achieve that level of success, but you make great games with ease. I know that's not the purpose of this blog, though.
On the other hand, I see a pattern in the way you start. You don't focus on competition in closed markets; you start on the wild, worldwide web, and your main focus is building an audience (both on FRVR and here). Is there a reason for that?
Sounds very much like what I've been doing/planning with SudokuPad, just more generically. To be fair, WSJ.com didn't ask for permission when they started using my app...