Five years is an age in mobile gaming terms, so it’s no surprise that relatively few of the smartphone games released in 2009 are still being played in 2014. That makes Words With Friends something of an oddity.

It was launched by indie developer Newtoy, which was subsequently bought in 2010 for $53.3m by Zynga. Newtoy’s founders Paul and David Bettner have since moved on, but their game remains one of the bright spots for its publisher as it looks for more success on mobile.

Hence New Words With Friends, a completely new version of the game launched this week for iOS and Android, after a lengthy beta period in countries like Australia and Canada to gauge player feedback to its new features.

The game itself remains the same: it’s essentially Scrabble, with players able to have a number of matches on the go at once, taking turns as often as suits them and their opponent. Games can be over in half an hour, or stretched over days and even weeks.

What’s new is a Solo Play mode to play offline against an artificial opponent, to hone your skills and also kill time if friends are dragging their heels over their turns in the multiplayer matches.

Also new: a Community Match feature that uses a Tinder-style swiping interface to accept or reject potential opponents from the wider Words With Friends community, browsing their photos and stats before deciding whether to request a match.

That relies on another new feature – player profiles tracking stats like average word score and number of games completed – while there’s also a dictionary to look up the words that you play.

“This is a really big deal for us,” Zynga’s vice president of games, Jonathan Knight, told The Guardian ahead of the new game’s release. “It’s an incredibly important title for Zynga, and this is the most significant update we’ve ever made to the game.”

Who cares about an update to a five-year-old mobile game, though? Plenty of people, according to Zynga. The company isn’t currently divulging how many players Words With Friends has, but Knight refers to an active community of “millions” and highlights another stat: 55m matches in progress at any given point.

There is external evidence of Words With Friends’ longevity, at least up until last year. Facebook analytics service AppData claimed that the game had 14.9 million monthly active users in January 2012 across mobile and Facebook, but that had risen to 22.8m by April 2013.

Zynga’s number of players across all its games has been falling steadily over the last couple of years, but I suspect Words With Friends has weathered the passage of time better than a franchise like FarmVille.

But this in itself brings risks when making changes to modernise a game such as Words With Friends: millions of players who’ll make their displeasure known loudly if they think the changes have ruined the game they love.

“We’ve taken a while with this title, rolling it out in countries such as Canada and Australia to give people time so we could engage with that community,” said Knight. “We’re happy in Australia that we’ve got 4.5 out of five stars on the App Store with hundreds of reviews: we’re seeing that validation in those countries.”

‘It’s more than just a word game – it’s a social app’

Why has Words With Friends lasted five years? The fact that even an official Scrabble game didn’t seem to dent its popularity suggests that the key is the game’s community – not least the fact that lots of your Facebook friends were likely to be playing it – rather than particular gameplay intricacies.

“It’s the social connections. It’s more than just a word game: it really is a social app, and a way to maintain meaningful relationships,” agreed Knight. “I’ve got aunts in Pennsylvania playing, and I get all of my news from that part of the family through them. And we’ve had people tell us they got married to people they met through the game too.”

That brings another challenge: how to make money from a game based on these kinds of personal relationships. On that score, it’s interesting that while Word With Friends does use in-app purchases, in Knight’s words it’s “a business largely driven by advertisements” – more like a Facebook or Twitter than a Clash of Clans or Candy Crush Saga in that respect.

Unsurprisingly, Knight thinks Words With Friends will still be going strong in five years’ time – he could hardly say otherwise, after all. “I firmly believe it’s got a long future ahead of it. It’s fundamentally like card games or chess or backgammon, which are played together as families,” he said.

“New generations of players will come in, so this is a really evergreen title. And for us, there is a large audience of Words players out there, and we see more opportunities to bring word games to our audience.”

This is an interesting change in strategy. Since Zynga bought Newtoy, its expansion efforts focused on the “With Friends” brand, with games including Matching With Friends, Running With Friends and Hanging With Friends.

Now, it’s focusing more on the “Words” part of the original game’s title. Zynga is currently testing a new game, Words on Tour, in countries including Ireland and Singapore.

It’s a travel-themed word-finding game adopting the “progression” mechanic of games such as Candy Crush Saga – think levels and three-star ratings – using a map of the world as its structure. It’s expected to launch globally soon.

I wonder if Words on Tour is an attempt to try something in this genre that suits in-app purchases more than advertising, and so will be more lucrative for Zynga. If so, New Words With Friends’ importance to the company may also be as a funnel driving a decent chunk of its players towards the new game.

Still, Knight says that New Words With Friends is significant on its own merits, especially if it can attract new players to what’s already one of the most well-known mobile games. “Imagine if you’re 20 years old and you get a new smartphone. Words With Friends came out a quarter of your life ago,” he said.

“It has a loyal following, but with New Words we’re getting new players in. In Australia, we see that the total population of new and existing Words players is larger now than it was just a few weeks ago. That’s really exciting.”

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