As LinkedIn expands its game portfolio, the platform is leaning into logic and away from word games.
LinkedIn released its latest game, “Patches,” today, March 18. “Patches” is a logic puzzle that requires players to fit rectangles of different sizes into a grid using a range of context clues, with the daily puzzles gradually becoming more difficult from Monday through Sunday. It’s the seventh original game to join LinkedIn’s growing portfolio — and the fourth consecutive LinkedIn Games release to focus on numbers and logic problems, rather than word puzzles.
Word games like “Crossclimb” and “Pinpoint” represented the majority of LinkedIn’s game portfolio when it launched in May 2024. Since then, however, the company has intentionally shifted away from word games and toward logic puzzles that don’t require English-language proficiency, according to LinkedIn senior director of product management Lakshman Somasundaram, who heads up the company’s video, games and moonshots organizations and spoke to GamesBeat about LinkedIn’s gaming strategy during an interview at LinkedIn’s New York City office.
“One of the challenging things about word games is being able to localize them across 20, 30 or 40 different languages to make them work, because oftentimes it’s a turn of phrase or an expression that doesn’t translate across every language,” said Somasundaram, who told GamesBeat that the majority of LinkedIn games players live outside the United States. “One thing that’s important to us is building the world’s best professional relationships through games. Many people work at companies where you’re working with colleagues across languages, across geos — and having games that work across all of that is the most important thing for us. Logic enables that.”
LinkedIn’s focus on logic games is supported by the numbers. “Zip,” which the platform launched almost exactly one year ago, is now LinkedIn’s most popular game, with Somasundaram describing the somewhat similar “Patches” as its “little sibling.” Pinpoint and Crossclimb, the two word-based LinkedIn games, are the least popular.
“One of the top requests that we got from folks is, ‘I love “Zip” — I want something more like “Zip,”’” Somasundaram said.
In addition to today’s new game launch, LinkedIn is planning additional updates to its gaming products in the coming year, including an expanded leaderboard that allows users to react to individuals’ scores and pick “favorite connections” whose daily scores will always be displayed first. Somasundaram was coy about if and when LinkedIn will launch a dedicated gaming tab on its mobile app, but said to “stay tuned,” pointing out that 70 percent of LinkedIn game players play on mobile, rather than desktop.
“We are working on a bunch of things to make it easier to find the games,” he said.
Although Somasundaram declined to share specific player counts or describe exactly how much LinkedIn has increased the head count of its games team, he made it clear that LinkedIn views games as a worthwhile investment and is continuing to put resources into their development. Although games are not yet tied to a direct revenue stream for LinkedIn, they keep people coming back to the platform — with 86 percent of people who play games on any given day playing the next day and 82 percent still playing 7 days later, according to figures shared by a LinkedIn representative.
“The lifeblood of LinkedIn’s business is people being connected. If people aren’t connected to each other, LinkedIn doesn’t work as a product,” Somasundaram said. “And games is a very obvious way of doing it — especially when you look at audiences like Gen Z.”