I guess it seems kinda obvious that a news organisation is bad at moonlighting as a game studio? They presumably have some metrics that somebody looks at, but I highly doubt they are as closely drawn to profitability as say an indie studio.

> “It’s fairly democratic,” Zoe Bell, the executive producer of New York Times Games, said in an interview. Anyone on the Games team can pitch an idea. It’s a departure from the process at Ms. Bell’s past jobs, where only the game designers were allowed to contribute ideas.

I guess that's the case for big game studios that have established pipelines of new games, but NYT is basically an indie studio with marketing handled by their parent company, and indie studios from what I've seen are very much unstructured and does not have a well established pipeline for launching new games.