8 ms·

The Xbox store page says this was released all the way back in 2012, so this is definitely not new. Even then, I'm pretty surprised at how low of a bar MS has f

The Xbox store page says this was released all the way back in 2012, so this is definitely not new. Even then, I'm pretty surprised at how low of a bar MS has for proudly putting their name on it. I can't imagine the likes of Google or Apple publishing an in-house-made cash-milking P2W game. Why did they need this, anyways? Are the absurd profits from all other sectors insufficient to make this tiny, obscure app completely free? Why do they need to penny-pinch so hard?

makeitdouble 2y ago
The difference is Apple and Google aren't game publishers in the first place. Microsoft has actual gaming studios producing otherwise full fledge-games aimed at making money. To note Minesweeper is no longer in Windows (looking at my win11 install, and there's actually no games anymore), so you'd have to go to the store to get this one, or any other.
- tavavex 2y ago
  My point wasn't just about games - it'd be equally applicable to regular software. What I'm saying is that certain practices always come off as cheap, something that desperate developers to do squeeze the most money out of anything they make. You wouldn't see banner ads in Google Authenticator, or a Pro subscription in Apple Notes that lets you have unlimited notes. Of course, those companies still monetize their big-name software products, but they never come off as cheap as MS entrusting a P2W mobile game with the official Microsoft(tm) Minesweeper(c) name. Of course, Microsoft is also a serious game publisher - even before their shopping spree, Xbox Game Studios had published actual, real, award-winning games. Which only makes this contrast with officially sponsoring borderline mobile shovelware even more jarring.
  - portpecos 2y ago
    > You wouldn't see banner ads in Google Authenticator, or a Pro subscription in Apple Notes that lets you have unlimited notes. Not yet. If Microsoft doesn’t experience any backlash for ad-laden freeware, I’m sure the Execs at Apple will think Notes+Ads is a fine strategy. I think Apple has been itching to do something with their Ad Server for a while.
    - r00fus 2y ago
      I think you don't understand Apple's brand. They would much rather charge $100 for wheels for the Mac Pro or double the cost for RAM upgrades than look cheap and have ads on basic apps.
      - kibwen 2y ago
        Classiness is relative. Enshittification is real, and Apple's ad division revenue is now in the tens of billions per year. As long as their ads are typeset in a classy font and less obtrusive than those being shown by Microsoft, it won't affect their brand and Apple users will eat happily shit with a big grin on their face. Like, what are people going to do instead? Use Linux?
        r00fus 2y ago
        Apple’s ad revenue is at single digit billions per annum. They’re not putting them in apps or websites I use (because it’s not mandatory) and I think if you ask around most people would agree. So if there’s enshittification , you’d have to pint it out to me. And unlike Microsoft and the ads in the start menu or control panel…
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    I feel that you're really offended about the marketing aspect of it, and want to reward brands that try harder to held a cohesive "Premium" image that helps their customer feel cajoled. Apple sure plays that game better than Microsoft. Google I don't know. Microsoft also probably don't see home customers as premium in the first place, and will keep the clean image for corporate entities only (and oh god do their corporate offering cost an arm and a leg) I personally don't care that much about the marketing aspect, at the end of the day Apple made broader moves to shut down right to repair, or went full malicious compliance when faced with the EU for instance. Not saying Microsoft has any high ground, they're all at the end of some antitrust trial. That's where I'll take something that'd dirty but actually works for me, vs being wined and dined in a golden prison cell.
  - briHass 2y ago
    I honestly would not be surprised if Google added some form of ads to Authenticator. The only reason they likely haven't is that it isn't the type of app that is used frequently or for long sessions. Microsoft has been pretty shameful with ads in Windows recently, but they also give away OS updates for free. Someone that purchased Win 7 has been able to go all the way to Win 11 for free (assuming their hardware is supported on 11).
    - techjamie 2y ago
      They basically give away the whole OS for free as long as you're willing to deal with some nag text and customization settings being disabled. I think you can do the same customization with third party tools anyway though. It never locks you out of your computer for not paying, and in exchange they slurp up whatever data they're shipping off from you.
      - lelanthran 2y ago
        > They basically give away the whole OS for free as long as you're willing to deal with some nag text and customization settings being disabled. This is news to me. By nag text do you mean the "Windows not activated" overlay in the bottom right of the screen? I've seen it before but not paid too much attention. Are the pro versions of Windows also for free with nag texts?
      - lye 2y ago
        This doesn't make it legitimate. You can just activate it through any of the third party kms servers (or massgrave for non-volume licensed versions) and stop pretending you have a legit copy. Same with those five dollar vl keys people buy off eBay for some unfathomable reason. Pure waste of money.
  - glimshe 2y ago
    This is very similar to King games, which is also a Microsoft subsidiary (as part of Activision Blizzard). The sad part isn't that Microsoft is publishing a P2W Minesweeper, but that the little simple Minesweeper we used to love is now gone. Maybe they realized that anyone who likes Minesweeper can now download a free Minesweeper clone, something that wasn't necessarily the easy or even possible (depending on where you lived) in the pre-Internet days when the original Minesweeper was created.
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      > the little simple Minesweeper we used to love is now gone. Reading from the history[0] it seems the whole concept of mine sweeping was getting controversial and when they had to deal with the touch paradigm they made the cut ? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Minesweeper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Minesweeper
      - WorldMaker 2y ago
        Yeah, Flower Mode was added late in the XP timeframe and was the only mode allowed in some countries. It does make sense that some countries with living problems from minefields might have some issues with the original game theme.
  - Blackthorn 2y ago
    I think the first big software house that did this to my memory was Oracle. It had bundled adware in the Java download. Absolutely blew my mind when I first saw it. Now it's normalized. Thanks Microsoft.
- card_zero 2y ago
  Win11, for me at least, came with a bunch of phone-app style solitaire games by "Random Salad". I can't find where the executables are: I suspect they're in the hidden folder Program Files\WindowsApps, which tells me "you don't currently have permission to access this folder" and then "you have been denied permission to access this folder". I just disconnected the internet and tried opening one of these games: it span a loading icon for about a minute, then sat with a black window for ages, before finally showing a phone-app card game with spontaneously bouncing icons (one of which would apparently turn ads on) and web links and a generally sketchy feeling. Windows used to come with a pinball game by Maxis (Will Wright, of SimCity), which was awesome.
  - thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
    >> Windows used to come with a pinball game by Maxis (Will Wright, of SimCity), which was awesome. https://alula.github.io/SpaceCadetPinball/ https://alula.github.io/SpaceCadetPinball/
    - card_zero 2y ago
      Nice. If anybody's wondering: flipper keys are z and /, nudge keys are x and ., and if you zoom the page by about 200% (ctrl-mousewheel) you can see there's a pinball game there.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    Yes, OEM installs come with their own (sometimes wild) surprises. On one hand, it's such a PITA to setup and cleaning windows becomes a rite or passage. On the other hand, OEMs exist, which is a big deal.
- bathtub365 2y ago
  Apple is definitely a game publisher, they have Apple Arcade.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    They definitely publish games, especially if we broaden it to the whole AppStore which is a publishing platform on its own. I should have put it as "game studio owner" I think.
fwip 2y ago
Conspiracy hat time: if the first-party games on the computer are predatory and pay-to-win, it conditions users to accept that situation. This in turn leads to increased profits for other predatory games/apps, of which Microsoft takes their cut.
- can16358p 2y ago
  This makes a lot of sense. Pure evil of course, and not to defend MS in any way, but makes sense from a faceless "extract-as-much-as-money-possible" perspective.
  - p0w3n3d 2y ago
    If I ever payed for minesweeper continue option I would combust
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  To clarify: it's not prebundled in Windows. You have to go download it like any other games. If you see it as first party, Minecraft Dungeons is also first party.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    They're straddling a line, I think. The games may not always be fully "installed" on a clean setup, but there are bundled shortcuts and other hooks to them.
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    Minecraft Dungeons is more first-party than Minesweeper at this point. Microsoft actually owns Mojang. Microsoft does not own Arkadium.
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  Technically they are Second Party games today. Arkadium have been building them since Windows 8. They get the Microsoft brand for what seems like it must be a very favorable contract, but they are an external, independently (privately held) company.
tempest_ 2y ago
You are not looking at it from the right perspective. Microsoft the company(and shareholders) gives absolutely no shit about it but there is someone somewhere in the org who has that app and its earnings in their yearly priorities and that person and perhaps the people who work for them do in fact care.
- smaudet 2y ago
  Eh? This app can be done in an afternoon. "that app and its earnings in their yearly priorities" If you mean, monetizing the day they spent on it, sure, but that's still just ridiculous.
  - fleshdaddy 2y ago
    I think that’s a little naive to how these massive dinosaurs operate. Microsoft doesn’t build anything in an afternoon, not even Minesweeper. There are probably multiple careers at least partially dependent on the metrics from this. Everything becomes an ongoing process at MS scale, for better or worse.
    - workfromspace 2y ago
      Maybe we can give Elon Musk a chance to be Microsoft's CEO.
      - tracker1 2y ago
        As much as I do appreciate Elon's takes on a lot of things and some of his approaches. I don't think he would work out well for a corporation the size of Microsoft. Microsoft is almost more of a conglomerate than a singular software (and hardware) company. It would take a solid leader who also appoints appropriate corporate heads in each division. The marching orders for Windows seems to be "monetize home users." They don't "sell" the OS anymore on practical terms for home use... it's more about trying to sell adjacent services, shove Edge with built in consumerware plugins and nickel and diming every possible corner to each out a dollar or two a year per user.
fleshdaddy 2y ago
Often times when this stuff comes up I think it’s Microsoft’s organizational structure that’s to blame. Namely that each team operates like their own little company in many ways. So the team and PM for minesweeper forget they’re just a small part of a broader ecosystem.
- haliskerbas 2y ago
  That’s been the case at most medium and large tech companies I’ve worked at. The incentives always seem structured that way.
  - cyanydeez 2y ago
    Capitalism only works this way. Why are people constantly surprised.
    - tremon 2y ago
      Having a capitalist structure inside a company is neither mandatory nor common.
- LaundroMat 2y ago
  This. Have each department be responsible for their own P&L and out the window goes whatever (brand, vision, ...) glues your organisation together.
- mperham 2y ago
  Indeed, it’s commonly said that the structure of any given software reflects the organizational structure which built it.
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  At some point I hope there's an interesting documentary or memoir on whatever happened to Microsoft's Carbonated Games, because in my mind as an Xbox fan from the early days of the 360 that's maybe where some of the interesting bodies were buried. At the time as an intern in an entirely different division, Carbonated Games seemed like it was built out of PopCap envy. (Today it might be called King envy, with the irony that Microsoft now owns King.) It seems like there was an idea to take casual games seriously, and they had some incredible talent. Hexic was designed by Alexey Pajitnov (of Tetris fame), who had been working for and was seemingly under-utilized by Microsoft for years at that point (other than Hexic his biggest known contribution to a Microsoft product was 1997's [fantastic] Microsoft Puzzle Collection aka Microsoft Entertainment Pack [5]: The Puzzle Collection). I don't have any clue how or why Carbonated Games blew up (other than jokes about maybe they were a bit over-carbonated), but the only official game they released was Hexic and a few later versions of Hexic. There was a sense that Carbonated was going to be the first party developer in charge of things like modern Solitaire and Minesweeper. For whatever reason that Carbonated blew up, when it blew up Microsoft let a second-party relationship (Arkadium) sweet talk them into that catbird seat. It's an incredible revenue stream for a privately held company and seems to be an incredibly favorable contract that lets them keep using Microsoft's brand. Should it ever finally come to light, I imagine that the full story of how Carbonated blew up and Arkadium was waiting in the wings for that seems likely to be some binary of either a completely dull story of bad budgeting and worse contracts or an incredible story of international intrigue, bribes, backstabs, and betrayals. (We already know Alexey Pajitnov is a player early in the story, and his Edgerton-led tale is in recent amusement media, but also more recently Arkadium got into a lot of hot water because the majority of their development staff were in an office in Crimea. There's a lot of interesting questions to be had there.)
jrockway 2y ago
As a long time Windows user, I get the feeling that Microsoft considers Solitaire and Minesweeper as the key differentiators on their platform. You use Windows to have Solitaire and Minesweeper; not for stability, developer APIs, backwards compatibility, security, etc. Those are all add-ons from the zero-interest-rate days that nobody cares about. Windows is about throwaway games; that's why you buy it instead of a Mac which comes with NO GAMES out of the box. As a result, this is what every PM wants to rally behind. "Increased revenue on Minesweeper by 4000% QoQ." That is how you become the CEO of Microsoft, probably! So you gotta do it. Having said that, I have neither Minesweeper nor Solitaire on my Windows 10 Pro install... so... I guess I'm technically incorrect. I do get this feeling that those two games are really what Microsoft sees the PC experience as being. Nobody ever told them that both games are actually super boring, and people only played them because the Internet didn't exist back then and it was better than staring into space while your typewriter warmed up or whatever people did in offices back in the day.
- maxwell 2y ago
  "Comes with NO GAMES"?? I switched to Mac for Apple Chess. And I was very glad to hear yesterday that they've committed to putting all of their wood behind it going forward.
  - jrockway 2y ago
    Hey chess is a sport, not a game!
- tavavex 2y ago
  This strikes me as a probably outdated view. If anything, Microsoft has de-emphasized preinstalled games and canned most of them since Windows 8, relegating them to being optional installs from the store. The internet says that the only preinstalled game in Win10/11 is Microsoft Solitaire Collection - but I can't even find that on my Windows 11 Pro install. So, considering macOS Chess, it's a one-for-one in terms of preinstalled games.
  - bmicraft 2y ago
babypuncher 2y ago
Because they don't make much money from Windows anymore. They sell licenses to OEM's for dirt cheap, no longer charge end-users for OS upgrades, and people don't buy new computers as often as they did 15 years ago. Google makes their money by sucking up all your data and using it to power AdSense. Apple makes money by selling you the whole damn computer with a healthy margin. I felt this enshittification of Windows was inevitable the moment they announced Windows 10 was a free upgrade for everyone.
- RogerL 2y ago
  Net profit margin has been going up since 2015 or so, release year of Windows 10. Gross profit has also been increasing YoY over the same time period. I know it isn't quite that simple - 2/3 of the business is cloud and productivity (Office, etc), and cloud is relatively new, adding a lot of growth, but there is nothing that forces them to eeek out nickels from 13yo via minesweeper ads.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    If every department is expected to function as profitably as the most-profitable department, then this can happen. Even if Windows makes money, if it doesn't make as much as Azure (or whatever else is doing really well at any given moment), then it stands out. Looking at "Home" Windows vs. "Pro" Windows probably makes this even more stark: I'd bet home/consumer editions of Windows are bleeding money. Heck, they've probably been losing money on home Windows for a decade or more (i.e. even back to when Microsoft still charged for updates), but the loss was offset by sales of Office (every non-techie's first question after giving them a clean Windows install: "where's Office?"). But now installed Office is getting replaced by cloud solutions, most of which aren't Microsoft.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  They make an absolute killing from Windows in the enterprise space though. Between Windows Server on-prem licenses, Azure AD, and Microsoft Office, it’s a very lucrative market. At this point, Windows Home largely just exists to lock people into the familiarity of Windows so it remains the de facto standard of businesses too
golemotron 2y ago
Ask the stock holders.
andsoitis 2y ago
> Google or Apple publishing an in-house-made cash-milking P2W game Google’s Stadia failed. Apple’s Arcade is arguably a failure. While we could debate the merit of granular choices like ads in minesweeper, taking a step back it is clear Microsoft is more savvy that those other two at gaming.
- philistine 2y ago
  I’ll definitely push back on that. Apple and Google run the number one and number two biggest gaming platforms by revenue. Microsoft is the also-ran, that can’t make more money than a hi-fi company who fell ass backwards into gaming.
  - simiones 2y ago
    Running an app store is completely different than running a games publishing or even development business. Microsoft publishes and develops games, and it also runs some games platforms. Google and Apple are almost exclusively in the platform side. Also, calling Android and iOS "gaming platforms" is a bit of stretch. the majority of successful mobile games are significantly different from more traditional games. In fact, they are much closer in their revenue and even development models to the gambling industry, especially in that they almost exclusively make their money off of the addiction of a few gamblers they have the poor taste to call "whales", which they actively seek to nurture. So, I would say that the gaming sides of iOS and Android's app stores are much closer to an online casino than to a games distribution platform (like Steam, the MS and Sony and Nintendo stores, etc). Of course, this is not really to defend Microsoft, especially when the whole discussion is about a game every bit as scummy as the worse that mobile gaming has to offer.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    By gaming revenue?
    - WorldMaker 2y ago
      Very much so. Apple's App Store revenue for just games in an average year is estimated to be somewhere around $8.5 billion which can beat all of Microsoft's Xbox division, Sony's PlayStation division, and all of Nintendo combined. It was pointed out in multiple threads that gamers were worried about Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard for too much control of videogames, but the real power and money maker that Microsoft was actually buying was always King. Mobile games are the real money makers and everything else is subsidized by that.
jandrese 2y ago
I'm pretty sure it was part of the wave that also included Solitare and Sudoku. They now want you to create an account and log in. There are ads before the game starts. The app is slow to start. All in all pretty terrible all around. Luckily this is on a PC and there are much better alternatives that will run just fine.
pradn 2y ago
Taste is a nebulous and rare thing. Microsoft rarely had it - it continues to flail around, with brief rays of hope - many of the Surface products are lovely. Will Microsoft enshittify Windows? Yes, it already has.
- esafak 2y ago
  I struggle to remember any point at which Windows (or DOS) was great. Perhaps Windows 2000. This is Windows thirteen years in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeUyxjLhAxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeUyxjLhAxU
  - pradn 2y ago
    Windows XP was rather beloved as well.

makeitdouble 2y ago

The difference is Apple and Google aren't game publishers in the first place. Microsoft has actual gaming studios producing otherwise full fledge-games aimed at making money. To note Minesweeper is no longer in Windows (looking at my win11 install, and there's actually no games anymore), so you'd have to go to the store to get this one, or any other.

tavavex 2y ago
My point wasn't just about games - it'd be equally applicable to regular software. What I'm saying is that certain practices always come off as cheap, something that desperate developers to do squeeze the most money out of anything they make. You wouldn't see banner ads in Google Authenticator, or a Pro subscription in Apple Notes that lets you have unlimited notes. Of course, those companies still monetize their big-name software products, but they never come off as cheap as MS entrusting a P2W mobile game with the official Microsoft(tm) Minesweeper(c) name. Of course, Microsoft is also a serious game publisher - even before their shopping spree, Xbox Game Studios had published actual, real, award-winning games. Which only makes this contrast with officially sponsoring borderline mobile shovelware even more jarring.
- portpecos 2y ago
  > You wouldn't see banner ads in Google Authenticator, or a Pro subscription in Apple Notes that lets you have unlimited notes. Not yet. If Microsoft doesn’t experience any backlash for ad-laden freeware, I’m sure the Execs at Apple will think Notes+Ads is a fine strategy. I think Apple has been itching to do something with their Ad Server for a while.
  - r00fus 2y ago
    I think you don't understand Apple's brand. They would much rather charge $100 for wheels for the Mac Pro or double the cost for RAM upgrades than look cheap and have ads on basic apps.
    - kibwen 2y ago
      Classiness is relative. Enshittification is real, and Apple's ad division revenue is now in the tens of billions per year. As long as their ads are typeset in a classy font and less obtrusive than those being shown by Microsoft, it won't affect their brand and Apple users will eat happily shit with a big grin on their face. Like, what are people going to do instead? Use Linux?
      - r00fus 2y ago
        Apple’s ad revenue is at single digit billions per annum. They’re not putting them in apps or websites I use (because it’s not mandatory) and I think if you ask around most people would agree. So if there’s enshittification , you’d have to pint it out to me. And unlike Microsoft and the ads in the start menu or control panel…
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  I feel that you're really offended about the marketing aspect of it, and want to reward brands that try harder to held a cohesive "Premium" image that helps their customer feel cajoled. Apple sure plays that game better than Microsoft. Google I don't know. Microsoft also probably don't see home customers as premium in the first place, and will keep the clean image for corporate entities only (and oh god do their corporate offering cost an arm and a leg) I personally don't care that much about the marketing aspect, at the end of the day Apple made broader moves to shut down right to repair, or went full malicious compliance when faced with the EU for instance. Not saying Microsoft has any high ground, they're all at the end of some antitrust trial. That's where I'll take something that'd dirty but actually works for me, vs being wined and dined in a golden prison cell.
- briHass 2y ago
  I honestly would not be surprised if Google added some form of ads to Authenticator. The only reason they likely haven't is that it isn't the type of app that is used frequently or for long sessions. Microsoft has been pretty shameful with ads in Windows recently, but they also give away OS updates for free. Someone that purchased Win 7 has been able to go all the way to Win 11 for free (assuming their hardware is supported on 11).
  - techjamie 2y ago
    They basically give away the whole OS for free as long as you're willing to deal with some nag text and customization settings being disabled. I think you can do the same customization with third party tools anyway though. It never locks you out of your computer for not paying, and in exchange they slurp up whatever data they're shipping off from you.
    - lelanthran 2y ago
      > They basically give away the whole OS for free as long as you're willing to deal with some nag text and customization settings being disabled. This is news to me. By nag text do you mean the "Windows not activated" overlay in the bottom right of the screen? I've seen it before but not paid too much attention. Are the pro versions of Windows also for free with nag texts?
    - lye 2y ago
      This doesn't make it legitimate. You can just activate it through any of the third party kms servers (or massgrave for non-volume licensed versions) and stop pretending you have a legit copy. Same with those five dollar vl keys people buy off eBay for some unfathomable reason. Pure waste of money.
- glimshe 2y ago
  This is very similar to King games, which is also a Microsoft subsidiary (as part of Activision Blizzard). The sad part isn't that Microsoft is publishing a P2W Minesweeper, but that the little simple Minesweeper we used to love is now gone. Maybe they realized that anyone who likes Minesweeper can now download a free Minesweeper clone, something that wasn't necessarily the easy or even possible (depending on where you lived) in the pre-Internet days when the original Minesweeper was created.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    > the little simple Minesweeper we used to love is now gone. Reading from the history[0] it seems the whole concept of mine sweeping was getting controversial and when they had to deal with the touch paradigm they made the cut ? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Minesweeper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Minesweeper
    - WorldMaker 2y ago
      Yeah, Flower Mode was added late in the XP timeframe and was the only mode allowed in some countries. It does make sense that some countries with living problems from minefields might have some issues with the original game theme.
- Blackthorn 2y ago
  I think the first big software house that did this to my memory was Oracle. It had bundled adware in the Java download. Absolutely blew my mind when I first saw it. Now it's normalized. Thanks Microsoft.
card_zero 2y ago
Win11, for me at least, came with a bunch of phone-app style solitaire games by "Random Salad". I can't find where the executables are: I suspect they're in the hidden folder Program Files\WindowsApps, which tells me "you don't currently have permission to access this folder" and then "you have been denied permission to access this folder". I just disconnected the internet and tried opening one of these games: it span a loading icon for about a minute, then sat with a black window for ages, before finally showing a phone-app card game with spontaneously bouncing icons (one of which would apparently turn ads on) and web links and a generally sketchy feeling. Windows used to come with a pinball game by Maxis (Will Wright, of SimCity), which was awesome.
- thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
  >> Windows used to come with a pinball game by Maxis (Will Wright, of SimCity), which was awesome. https://alula.github.io/SpaceCadetPinball/ https://alula.github.io/SpaceCadetPinball/
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Nice. If anybody's wondering: flipper keys are z and /, nudge keys are x and ., and if you zoom the page by about 200% (ctrl-mousewheel) you can see there's a pinball game there.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Yes, OEM installs come with their own (sometimes wild) surprises. On one hand, it's such a PITA to setup and cleaning windows becomes a rite or passage. On the other hand, OEMs exist, which is a big deal.
bathtub365 2y ago
Apple is definitely a game publisher, they have Apple Arcade.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  They definitely publish games, especially if we broaden it to the whole AppStore which is a publishing platform on its own. I should have put it as "game studio owner" I think.

fwip 2y ago

Conspiracy hat time: if the first-party games on the computer are predatory and pay-to-win, it conditions users to accept that situation. This in turn leads to increased profits for other predatory games/apps, of which Microsoft takes their cut.

can16358p 2y ago
This makes a lot of sense. Pure evil of course, and not to defend MS in any way, but makes sense from a faceless "extract-as-much-as-money-possible" perspective.
- p0w3n3d 2y ago
  If I ever payed for minesweeper continue option I would combust
makeitdouble 2y ago
To clarify: it's not prebundled in Windows. You have to go download it like any other games. If you see it as first party, Minecraft Dungeons is also first party.
- kbolino 2y ago
  They're straddling a line, I think. The games may not always be fully "installed" on a clean setup, but there are bundled shortcuts and other hooks to them.
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  Minecraft Dungeons is more first-party than Minesweeper at this point. Microsoft actually owns Mojang. Microsoft does not own Arkadium.
WorldMaker 2y ago
Technically they are Second Party games today. Arkadium have been building them since Windows 8. They get the Microsoft brand for what seems like it must be a very favorable contract, but they are an external, independently (privately held) company.

tempest_ 2y ago

You are not looking at it from the right perspective. Microsoft the company(and shareholders) gives absolutely no shit about it but there is someone somewhere in the org who has that app and its earnings in their yearly priorities and that person and perhaps the people who work for them do in fact care.

smaudet 2y ago
Eh? This app can be done in an afternoon. "that app and its earnings in their yearly priorities" If you mean, monetizing the day they spent on it, sure, but that's still just ridiculous.
- fleshdaddy 2y ago
  I think that’s a little naive to how these massive dinosaurs operate. Microsoft doesn’t build anything in an afternoon, not even Minesweeper. There are probably multiple careers at least partially dependent on the metrics from this. Everything becomes an ongoing process at MS scale, for better or worse.
  - workfromspace 2y ago
    Maybe we can give Elon Musk a chance to be Microsoft's CEO.
    - tracker1 2y ago
      As much as I do appreciate Elon's takes on a lot of things and some of his approaches. I don't think he would work out well for a corporation the size of Microsoft. Microsoft is almost more of a conglomerate than a singular software (and hardware) company. It would take a solid leader who also appoints appropriate corporate heads in each division. The marching orders for Windows seems to be "monetize home users." They don't "sell" the OS anymore on practical terms for home use... it's more about trying to sell adjacent services, shove Edge with built in consumerware plugins and nickel and diming every possible corner to each out a dollar or two a year per user.

fleshdaddy 2y ago

Often times when this stuff comes up I think it’s Microsoft’s organizational structure that’s to blame. Namely that each team operates like their own little company in many ways. So the team and PM for minesweeper forget they’re just a small part of a broader ecosystem.

haliskerbas 2y ago
That’s been the case at most medium and large tech companies I’ve worked at. The incentives always seem structured that way.
- cyanydeez 2y ago
  Capitalism only works this way. Why are people constantly surprised.
  - tremon 2y ago
    Having a capitalist structure inside a company is neither mandatory nor common.
LaundroMat 2y ago
This. Have each department be responsible for their own P&L and out the window goes whatever (brand, vision, ...) glues your organisation together.
mperham 2y ago
Indeed, it’s commonly said that the structure of any given software reflects the organizational structure which built it.
WorldMaker 2y ago
At some point I hope there's an interesting documentary or memoir on whatever happened to Microsoft's Carbonated Games, because in my mind as an Xbox fan from the early days of the 360 that's maybe where some of the interesting bodies were buried. At the time as an intern in an entirely different division, Carbonated Games seemed like it was built out of PopCap envy. (Today it might be called King envy, with the irony that Microsoft now owns King.) It seems like there was an idea to take casual games seriously, and they had some incredible talent. Hexic was designed by Alexey Pajitnov (of Tetris fame), who had been working for and was seemingly under-utilized by Microsoft for years at that point (other than Hexic his biggest known contribution to a Microsoft product was 1997's [fantastic] Microsoft Puzzle Collection aka Microsoft Entertainment Pack [5]: The Puzzle Collection). I don't have any clue how or why Carbonated Games blew up (other than jokes about maybe they were a bit over-carbonated), but the only official game they released was Hexic and a few later versions of Hexic. There was a sense that Carbonated was going to be the first party developer in charge of things like modern Solitaire and Minesweeper. For whatever reason that Carbonated blew up, when it blew up Microsoft let a second-party relationship (Arkadium) sweet talk them into that catbird seat. It's an incredible revenue stream for a privately held company and seems to be an incredibly favorable contract that lets them keep using Microsoft's brand. Should it ever finally come to light, I imagine that the full story of how Carbonated blew up and Arkadium was waiting in the wings for that seems likely to be some binary of either a completely dull story of bad budgeting and worse contracts or an incredible story of international intrigue, bribes, backstabs, and betrayals. (We already know Alexey Pajitnov is a player early in the story, and his Edgerton-led tale is in recent amusement media, but also more recently Arkadium got into a lot of hot water because the majority of their development staff were in an office in Crimea. There's a lot of interesting questions to be had there.)

jrockway 2y ago

As a long time Windows user, I get the feeling that Microsoft considers Solitaire and Minesweeper as the key differentiators on their platform. You use Windows to have Solitaire and Minesweeper; not for stability, developer APIs, backwards compatibility, security, etc. Those are all add-ons from the zero-interest-rate days that nobody cares about. Windows is about throwaway games; that's why you buy it instead of a Mac which comes with NO GAMES out of the box. As a result, this is what every PM wants to rally behind. "Increased revenue on Minesweeper by 4000% QoQ." That is how you become the CEO of Microsoft, probably! So you gotta do it. Having said that, I have neither Minesweeper nor Solitaire on my Windows 10 Pro install... so... I guess I'm technically incorrect. I do get this feeling that those two games are really what Microsoft sees the PC experience as being. Nobody ever told them that both games are actually super boring, and people only played them because the Internet didn't exist back then and it was better than staring into space while your typewriter warmed up or whatever people did in offices back in the day.

maxwell 2y ago
"Comes with NO GAMES"?? I switched to Mac for Apple Chess. And I was very glad to hear yesterday that they've committed to putting all of their wood behind it going forward.
- jrockway 2y ago
  Hey chess is a sport, not a game!
tavavex 2y ago
This strikes me as a probably outdated view. If anything, Microsoft has de-emphasized preinstalled games and canned most of them since Windows 8, relegating them to being optional installs from the store. The internet says that the only preinstalled game in Win10/11 is Microsoft Solitaire Collection - but I can't even find that on my Windows 11 Pro install. So, considering macOS Chess, it's a one-for-one in terms of preinstalled games.
- bmicraft 2y ago

babypuncher 2y ago

Because they don't make much money from Windows anymore. They sell licenses to OEM's for dirt cheap, no longer charge end-users for OS upgrades, and people don't buy new computers as often as they did 15 years ago. Google makes their money by sucking up all your data and using it to power AdSense. Apple makes money by selling you the whole damn computer with a healthy margin. I felt this enshittification of Windows was inevitable the moment they announced Windows 10 was a free upgrade for everyone.

RogerL 2y ago
Net profit margin has been going up since 2015 or so, release year of Windows 10. Gross profit has also been increasing YoY over the same time period. I know it isn't quite that simple - 2/3 of the business is cloud and productivity (Office, etc), and cloud is relatively new, adding a lot of growth, but there is nothing that forces them to eeek out nickels from 13yo via minesweeper ads.
- kbolino 2y ago
  If every department is expected to function as profitably as the most-profitable department, then this can happen. Even if Windows makes money, if it doesn't make as much as Azure (or whatever else is doing really well at any given moment), then it stands out. Looking at "Home" Windows vs. "Pro" Windows probably makes this even more stark: I'd bet home/consumer editions of Windows are bleeding money. Heck, they've probably been losing money on home Windows for a decade or more (i.e. even back to when Microsoft still charged for updates), but the loss was offset by sales of Office (every non-techie's first question after giving them a clean Windows install: "where's Office?"). But now installed Office is getting replaced by cloud solutions, most of which aren't Microsoft.
hnlmorg 2y ago
They make an absolute killing from Windows in the enterprise space though. Between Windows Server on-prem licenses, Azure AD, and Microsoft Office, it’s a very lucrative market. At this point, Windows Home largely just exists to lock people into the familiarity of Windows so it remains the de facto standard of businesses too

golemotron 2y ago

Ask the stock holders.

andsoitis 2y ago

> Google or Apple publishing an in-house-made cash-milking P2W game Google’s Stadia failed. Apple’s Arcade is arguably a failure. While we could debate the merit of granular choices like ads in minesweeper, taking a step back it is clear Microsoft is more savvy that those other two at gaming.

philistine 2y ago
I’ll definitely push back on that. Apple and Google run the number one and number two biggest gaming platforms by revenue. Microsoft is the also-ran, that can’t make more money than a hi-fi company who fell ass backwards into gaming.
- simiones 2y ago
  Running an app store is completely different than running a games publishing or even development business. Microsoft publishes and develops games, and it also runs some games platforms. Google and Apple are almost exclusively in the platform side. Also, calling Android and iOS "gaming platforms" is a bit of stretch. the majority of successful mobile games are significantly different from more traditional games. In fact, they are much closer in their revenue and even development models to the gambling industry, especially in that they almost exclusively make their money off of the addiction of a few gamblers they have the poor taste to call "whales", which they actively seek to nurture. So, I would say that the gaming sides of iOS and Android's app stores are much closer to an online casino than to a games distribution platform (like Steam, the MS and Sony and Nintendo stores, etc). Of course, this is not really to defend Microsoft, especially when the whole discussion is about a game every bit as scummy as the worse that mobile gaming has to offer.
- itishappy 2y ago
  By gaming revenue?
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    Very much so. Apple's App Store revenue for just games in an average year is estimated to be somewhere around $8.5 billion which can beat all of Microsoft's Xbox division, Sony's PlayStation division, and all of Nintendo combined. It was pointed out in multiple threads that gamers were worried about Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard for too much control of videogames, but the real power and money maker that Microsoft was actually buying was always King. Mobile games are the real money makers and everything else is subsidized by that.

jandrese 2y ago

I'm pretty sure it was part of the wave that also included Solitare and Sudoku. They now want you to create an account and log in. There are ads before the game starts. The app is slow to start. All in all pretty terrible all around. Luckily this is on a PC and there are much better alternatives that will run just fine.

pradn 2y ago

Taste is a nebulous and rare thing. Microsoft rarely had it - it continues to flail around, with brief rays of hope - many of the Surface products are lovely. Will Microsoft enshittify Windows? Yes, it already has.

esafak 2y ago
I struggle to remember any point at which Windows (or DOS) was great. Perhaps Windows 2000. This is Windows thirteen years in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeUyxjLhAxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeUyxjLhAxU
- pradn 2y ago
  Windows XP was rather beloved as well.