LinkedIn may be a social network for professionals, but it might soon become a little more fun. Yes, if you use this platform to search for jobs or connect with people in your industry, you may soon notice a little distraction during your next visit: games.
After a independent researcher made this discovery, LinkedIn confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is working on adding games to its platform. The games appear to be short, simple puzzle games; four have been revealed so far:
- Queens
- Inference
- Crossclimb
- Blueprint
The goal of LinkedIn is of course to make you spend more time on its website
“We’re trying to add puzzle games to the LinkedIn experience to bring a little fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark conversations,” a LinkedIn representative said in a communicated.
If the feature launches as announced, LinkedIn Games will give you a score after each game. To encourage you to come back, LinkedIn is experimenting with a company ranking based on employee scores. You will also be able to see how many of your connections are playing this game and how many days in a row you have played.
Games may just be a fun way to compete with colleagues and others in your professional circle, but LinkedIn’s goal is of course to make you spend more time on its website. And if the success of wildly popular games like Wordle is anything to go by, LinkedIn might just be on the right track. Even Netflix has jumped on the gaming trend, recently adding playable titles to its regular content.
Microsoft, which has extensive gaming expertise, acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016. Microsoft also acquired Activision Blizzard, which owns the King gaming franchises, for $69 billion in 2023. LinkedIn appears However, it wants to create its own games rather than using some of the titles its parent company owns, at least for now.
There’s no release date yet for LinkedIn’s games, nor do we know if your game scores will be included in your performance reviews during annual reviews…
Source: “ZDNet.com”