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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

I don't feel bad for the game developer. Its business model is to publish simple classic games, but with ads.

>Its business model is to publish simple classic games, but with ads.

Is this not precisely what Microsoft is doing?

I haven't played game of solitaire since Windows 7 because I'm not going to watch a 15-30 second preroll video advertisement in order to play the Microsoft Solitaire Collection.

And I'm certainly not going to pay monthly to avoid ads for games that used to be included with the OS without advertisements.

Have you considered that perhaps it's not the ad itself but that it just takes a 15-30 seconds of a delay to maybe realize that you're about to waste your time / ease your boredom that maybe keeps you from playing?

Every ad on YouTube makes me reconsider how badly I want to watch the video. Lots of times I just close YouTube and pull up Bitchute.

Tangent: Is there anything on bitchute that isn't right-wing or conspiracy theory? I've just pulled it up for the first time and by the front-page videos it's an alt-right cesspool. I'll use the alternative if it's viable, but this content isn't.

I felt the same way. I ended up setting firewall rules for Minesweeper because there is absolutely no reason for it to be calling out to the web for ads to serve. The game still works fine!

The old games (and calculator) from xp through windows 8 still run just fine, all you need is the right files.

With NTVDMx64 and/or winevdm, you should even be able to run the even older WEP games (Tetris works nearly perfectly with winevdm)

Exactly. I hope Apple Arcade takes a big bite out of ad supported games on iOS.

However, if there is an option to pay for the games to get rid of ads, I have no problem with him publishing games and making money on either ads or people paying.

As long as there's an option to remove them, I look at ad-supported games as a demo. I'll always gladly pay to remove the ads if I like the game enough to play it more than a couple times.

The ad-supported version can be a disaster for your privacy though.

Plus, a lot of apps don't remove their ad SDK even if you do pay to not "see" the ads, so you are still being tracked either way.

Can be, but it's possible to serve ads without any activity/data tracking. Not as profitable, but that's how it used to be done - simply guessing what the users may be interested in and A/B testing ads for various niches until you hone in on the most profitable ones.

Ads are pretty cancerous, but the easiest way to start monetizing free content/software.

> Its business model is to publish simple classic games, but with ads.

Can you explains what's wrong with this?

You are aware that some people enjoy playing simple classic games? You are aware that some people don't like or can't even use credit card online right? What's the solution do you bring that allow theses peoples to have entertainment? Are you going to bring them their simple classic games that they want for free? Why aren't you already doing it?

No one force you to play theses games, but in a weird way you enjoy seeing people losing a great source of entertainment. That's kind of worrying.

s/that/"I don't feel bad for the game developer, they don't gatekeep with their pricing model"

Framing adware as a socially progressive business model is nauseating.

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