LinkedIn has launched Games...What's the big deal !

Yeah, the supposedly serious (read: cringe) social network, LinkedIn has launched Games.

What’s the big deal behind games?

Gaming engagement thrives on the interactive and immersive experiences that players encounter. The sense of achievement, social interaction, and continuous content updates keep players coming back for more.

• They are fun.
• They bring the audience.
• They drive retention.
• They drive subscription $$.
• They drive dopamine.
• They can never trigger negative emotions (like reading news or cringy linkedin posts 😱)

Linkedin’s Inspiration: NYT Games

NYT's games feature (remember NYT's acquisition of Wordle?) has helped NYT survive the media bloodbath.

The NYT Games app was downloaded 10 million times last year.

"Our vision is to be the premier subscription destination for digital puzzles," Jonathan Knight, NYT's head of games. "What we do uniquely, I think, is have a human-made, human-curated, high degree of editorial rigor and quality standards, and fact-checking and editors upon editors — and we're at a scale where we can really mount that kind of human effort to get behind our puzzles." [Via]

You can play the games here.

As Madam Vidya Balan once said: It's all about entertainment, entertainment and entertainment.