# I regret to inform you that LinkedIn’s games are very fun

Source: https://www.theverge.com/24152045/linkedin-games-crossclimb-queens-pinpoint
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/I-regret-to-inform-you-that-LinkedIns-games-are-very-fun?index=0x663cada2eb9d1adc092937e2000ca50d10ddae823785e8df0adaa519c2e80e986a82c98d
Submitted by freeatnet.eth on 2024-05-09 UTC, 2 upvotes, 2 comments

## Summary

LinkedIn has added three daily games to its app, Pinpoint, Crossclimb, and Queens, and columnist David Pierce says they are fun and effective at bringing him back every day. He describes the games as closely modeled on The New York Times' puzzles, with Pinpoint resembling Connections in reverse and Crossclimb resembling the Times' mini crossword. Pierce writes that LinkedIn is using the games to become more than a job site, and he notes that Microsoft reported LinkedIn revenue up 10 percent year over year, and that CEO Satya Nadella said engagement hit a record high last quarter.

## Article

I almost didn’t get Pinpoint this morning. Here’s what it taught me about B2B sales.

I’m kidding! But I have to admit something: I’ve been going on LinkedIn every day recently, and I’m having a great time. Last week, the company announced it was adding three games to its app, both on desktop and mobile, as a naked engagement ploy to get you to open the app every day. I hate to say this, but it’s working.

The three games are called Pinpoint, Crossclimb, and Queens. Pinpoint is basically The New York Times’ Connections game but in reverse: the game gives you items, and you have to guess the category. Crossclimb is like the Times’ mini crossword, with a twist that you then have to rearrange the answers into a word ladder. And Queens, my favorite of the three games — and probably the hardest, too — is sort of a Minesweeper-y take on sudoku in which you have to place a queen in each row, column, and color without overlapping. (It’s remarkable, and almost shameless, how closely LinkedIn follows the Times’ formula. Give it a few weeks, and I’m sure there’ll be a twist on Wordle and a full crossword puzzle in here somewhere.)

You can play all three games in 10 minutes or so, and they scratch the exact same daily itch that the Times’ game cycle does. None of them are hard, really, though there have been days where the Pinpoint categories seem particularly esoteric or my pre-coffee brain just can’t handle Queens. But before I realized it, I was coming back to all three games every day.

I don’t love that my morning routine now involves opening LinkedIn — there’s a direct link that gets you right to the games, which helps — but it’s a pretty smart move for the company. The Times’ bet on gaming has paid off in a big way: the company’s chief product officer, Alex Hardiman, told Vanity Fair last year that “a lot of people are actually buying the bundle through our Games product.” (That Vanity Fair story also references a joke you hear a lot in media circles these days: that the Times is a cooking and crosswords company with a side hustle in news.) The Times just opened up the Wordle archive, giving people even more stuff to play, and said that the game is still played by “tens of millions of players every week.” Give people a fun, repeatable game with a leaderboard and a streak tracker, and they’ll come back.

Give people a fun, repeatable game with a leaderboard and a streak tracker, and they’ll come back

Getting people to come back is crucial for LinkedIn, which is trying to become more than just “the place you go to look for jobs.” The Microsoft-owned company wants badly to be a full-on social network: it has tried to be more like TikTok, got big into live audio in that brief moment when everyone was big into live audio, tried to make LinkedIn stories a thing, and continues to shift the product around posts and news feeds rather than just boring old job listings.

It’s all a bit cringeworthy, but it’s working. Microsoft reported in April that LinkedIn’s revenue was up 10 percent year over year, and CEO Satya Nadella said that engagement on LinkedIn was at a record high this past quarter. If getting people to play games and network with semi-random connections about their scores keeps people on LinkedIn longer, you can bet there will be more. And then there will probably be some weird things about recruiters ruling people out based on their Crossclimb score. I don’t know, it’ll get weird. It’s LinkedIn.

So, begrudgingly, kudos to LinkedIn for getting me hooked. I just have one request, though: can we not all do the thing where we share our scores? Those colored blocks were a huge part of how Wordle went viral, but nobody needs that. Especially not on LinkedIn. I’ve got broetry to read.

Correction, May 9th: This story originally referred to the NYT game Connections as “Categories.” It is called Connections, and it’s great.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

David Pierce

## Comments

**kellyan.eth**: It's been a while since many of China Tech Giants(Taobao, PDD etc) embedded the mini games to drive the daily activation, glad to see this innovation wave has finally reach to Western social media apps lol

**freeatnet.eth**: @kellyan.eth I feel like the origins of these simple time-waster games in Western social media is Facebook games (I remember playing Tetris on Facebook ages ago), but it’d be funny if LinkedIn took inspiration from the Chinese social media sites!