LinkedIn goes deeper into puzzle games with Tango, following success of Queens

Every morning, Emily Ritter spends 15 minutes in bed checking her Instagram, Messages, Slack and Strava apps and playing The New York Times’ Connections and Strands games on her phone. Recently, LinkedIn has been part of the mix.

Ritter, a marketing executive at San Francisco-based startup Front, discovered a logic puzzle called Queens about two months ago through a promotion on LinkedIn, which is best known as the place where professionals connect and recruiters find talent.

“It’s just kind of a fun brainteaser,” Ritter said. “It’s a way to do something sort of relaxing, but in an engaging way.”

LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired for $27 billion in 2016, rolled out its first three games in May, and Queens has emerged as the hottest of the trio.

On Tuesday, the company launches game number four, and it’s going deeper into logic puzzles with a title called Tango. In the game, a user is presented with a grid, and a few squares are filled in with a sun or a moon. It’s up to the player to fill in each remaining square with a sun or a moon, based on a few rules.

While LinkedIn consistently ranks as a top 100 app on iOS in the U.S., it’s below other social apps like TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat and X as well as Meta services such as Facebook and Instagram, according to industry researcher Sensor Tower.

Games represent a form of content that, when done right, keep people coming back. And it’s a market that Microsoft knows well. The company introduced its first Xbox console in 2001, and now has a games business generating $22 billion in annual revenue following the purchase of Activision Blizzard a year ago.

Yet gaming wasn’t a part of LinkedIn for the first seven years after the acquisition, which was Microsoft’s biggest ever until the Activision deal. Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief, says the games are designed to be played a little bit each day, perhaps when the day begins or as a short interlude between projects. Hopefully, they’ll spark conversations with colleagues and industry peers.

“You start with your game score and you move on to other areas,” Roth said.

It’s a familiar model. The New York Times offers eight games, and made a splash in the market in 2022 with the purchase of viral word game Wordle. The newspaper publisher saw tens of millions of new users and added subscribers after the acquisition.

LinkedIn, which generates revenue from recruiting services and advertising, isn’t planning to charge people to play its games, a spokesperson said. In the fiscal year that ended on June 30, LinkedIn generated $16 billion in revenue, or about 7% of Microsoft’s total.

The unit “continues to see accelerated member growth and record engagement,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts on the company’s July earnings call, months after membership crossed the 1 billion mark.

LinkedIn has been busy this year. It has built artificial intelligence features to help job seekers and students of its online courses. It’s been bringing a TikTok-like video tab to the LinkedIn mobile app.

And LinkedIn released its eighth annual list of the top 50 large companies to work at in the U.S.

Fun is a key part of the best workplaces, whether it be through banter, recreational sports or a happy hour, said Lakshman Somasundaram, the LinkedIn product management director who leads up games.

“It’s not just meetings and documents,” he said. “It’s important to us that LinkedIn reflects what the world’s best workplaces feel like.”

In September, LinkedIn surveyed around 900 members, and 83% said it was their favorite game the site offered, the spokesperson said.

Queens requires players to drop one crown emoji in each row and one in each column of a grid, a format that’s “a little bit sudoku-like,” said Thomas Snyder, the game’s architect. Snyder, a scientist formerly with Freenome and Adaptive Biotechnologies, won the 2018 World Puzzle Championship.

Joe Weinman, a former AT&T executive in New Jersey, has solved Queens for 46 days in a row. His streak would be at 90, but he forgot to play one day, he said in a LinkedIn message.

“I’d sooner give up my left arm than give up Queens,” he wrote, adding that he used to be on LinkedIn once a week.

And now there’s a place for Weinman and other addicts to congregate. In July Somasundaram started posting daily videos that reveal solutions to Queens puzzles on a dedicated page for the game. The videos garner hundreds of comments.

Somasundaram said he plans to produce videos about Tango.

Ritter has watched some of the Queens videos. She said she’s learned how to get through the puzzles relatively quickly.

“I guess I have just sort of figured out some of the tricks,” Ritter wrote in a LinkedIn message, adding that she would probably enjoy new challenging games.

When LinkedIn decided to launch a new logic game, employees came up with a few principles and brought them to Snyder. He sent back samples, and LinkedIn team members suggested additions, said LinkedIn games editor Paolo Pasco, who has constructed crossword puzzles for The New York Times.

In Tango, the objective is to get each row and column of the grid to have the same number of suns and moons. No more than two of a kind can be next to each other vertically or horizontally. An equal sign between two squares means the two must be the same, and an X between them requires the symbols to be opposites.

It’s a simple concept, but the puzzles get harder as the week progresses, just like The New York Times’ crossword puzzle.

LinkedIn promotes its games on its homepage and in the app’s My Network tab. But 40% of the people who play come in through a link, which might have been shared in a conversation or a post. After completing a game, LinkedIn makes it easy to copy your score and a link so you can send the information to connections or publish a post.

Between the links and the daily videos, people are coming back for more. LinkedIn’s App Store ranking tends to dip on the weekends, according to Sensor Tower, suggesting less usage when people aren’t at work.

“Professionals are playing games regularly, even on the weekends,” the spokesperson said.

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