A few years ago, Netflix announced that it will be adding a gaming catalogue as an additional benefit to its subscribers, with questionable success. Now, it looks like LinkedIn is joining in the fun, in a manner of speaking, with a list of three games of its own. These are accessible both via desktop or the mobile app.
As of now, LinkedIn has three games that you can play, with one being Pinpoint. The first is a word association game that has you guess a category that five words presented to you fit into. The words don’t all immediately appear, and more words appear over time, with the objective being guessing the category with the least number of words.
Then there’s Crossclimb, which is a strange one. You asked to come up with a ladder of words, with each “step” having one letter that’s different from the others. There will be locked “steps” that you’ll have to unlock by first rearranging existing steps in the way described above.
Finally, there’s Queens, which is basically Sudoku, but without the numbers and the grids being arranged in specific shapes to add to the complexity. As you’d imagine, the goal is to make it so that no queens touch each other within the grid, and there is one queen in each row and column.
Perhaps it goes without saying that you can’t play any of these unless you have a LinkedIn account. And according to The Verge, you can only play each game once a day, which is a very strange limitation which stinks of mobile gaming monetisation. For now though, the social media platform isn’t charging for any of these.
The report also notes that LinkedIn’s product director, Lakshman Somasundaram, says “It’s time we turn over a new leaf in how we deepen and reignite relationships at work, and put fun at the heart of it”. Which doesn’t quite sound like a fit for what is otherwise a professional social media.
It also remains to be seen if it can do better than Netflix, which previously only had its games played by one percent of subscribers. For what it’s worth, you can try the three LinkedIn games for yourself by hitting the link below.
(Source: LinkedIn, The Verge, TechCrunch)
