LinkedIn wants to add a little more fun to its feed.
Posts on social media and a report from TechCrunch over the weekend revealed the Microsoft-owned platform may add several puzzle-based games to the overall LinkedIn experience, some of which are titled “Queens,” “Inference,” and “Crossclimb.”
“We’re playing with adding puzzle-based games within the LinkedIn experience to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations,” a LinkedIn representative said in a statement.
It’s not hard to see why someone at LinkedIn might’ve hit upon offering a few unique gaming experiences as a way to draw in more users.
Casual games like Farmville are part of what put Facebook on the map back in the day, and millions of people visit the The New York Times website just to do the crossword or play Wordle. Casual games are a proven way to get people to spend more time on a given website.
There’s also an argument to be made that LinkedIn is in a unique position to capitalize on growth while X (formerly known as Twitter) is seeing lower user count numbers.
The barrier between LinkedIn and other social networks isn’t audience uptake; it’s the “social” part. Very few people seem to just hang out on LinkedIn unless they’re specifically discussing their jobs.
However, there’s a chance that could change.
As Slate’s Scott Nover pointed out last year, LinkedIn has become slightly more casual, and hasn’t adopted most of Facebook or X’s worst habits. For all its issues, LinkedIn is still very much a place where you go to talk directly to people, without any particular interference from bots, inscrutable algorithms, or random communities. In the great battle of 2020s social media, LinkedIn scored a lot of points by standing still.
It makes sense that LinkedIn would try to double down on that by providing more activities to get people to stop by LinkedIn for something besides work, and Microsoft has a long history of creating addictive casual games.
I have my doubts that LinkedIn will ever shake off its reputation for being slightly boring, but at a point in time when most other major social media platforms are actively infuriating, maybe “boring” has a role to play.
LinkedIn generated over $4 billion in Microsoft’s most recent quarter. Its revenue has steadily grown since Microsoft acquired it in late 2016 for $26 billion. The platform has more than 1 billion members across 200 countries and territories.
