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.)
If I showed up for work in a top hat, gold watch and a lovely lavender evening gown under a piss soaked parka while wearing clown shoes, I would be asked politely but firmly to go home and come back in a presentable fashion for my job.
The MANGA companies do the organizational equivalent of this on the daily and rather than excusing them from the gala people line up to dance and hope that some of the leftover urine dribbles on them.
It's pure insanity that we as a society have no uniformly and completely recoiled in horror from them.
https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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).
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?
Same with those five dollar vl keys people buy off eBay for some unfathomable reason. Pure waste of money.
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 ?
Windows used to come with a pinball game by Maxis (Will Wright, of SimCity), which was awesome.
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.
I should have put it as "game studio owner" I think.
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.
Microsoft is the also-ran, that can’t make more money than a hi-fi company who fell ass backwards into gaming.
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.
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.
PlayStation revenue is $29B/year. Xbox should be somewhere in the $15B/year range after the Activision purchase. Nintendo is $12B/year. Each of those alone is more than $8.5B, let along combined.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-doesnt-make-videogames-bu...
Still... if that reporting is even in the ballpark it implies big gaming revenue for two companies that don't make any games.
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.
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.
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.
If you can't as a company belt out a simple game in a short amount of time without roping in 4 project managers a senior project manager 2 senior developers 12 code monkeys and 4 graphic designers and all the overhead to manage them, your company sucks and should be buried.
Heck, once you factor in alpha, beta, and user testing, I don't think anyone could build a releasable Minesweeper in an afternoon unless it's just a junk implementation.
Like what would be the scope of an "alpha" that isn't a working game? Opening an empty window? Writing a console version of the logic?
True, but there's a lot more to it than the game logic. Regardless, it's not a complex application by any standard -- but I don't think I know any dev who could implement it well and in its finished form in an afternoon.
> Like what would be the scope of an "alpha" that isn't a working game?
I don't understand this question. Any alpha is a working program. If the devs don't think it's done, then it's not yet an alpha.
Apple is making similar mistakes with their aggressive App Store take rate, by allowing so many scam apps on the App Store, and with their unfair policy enforcement. Apple sentiment among developers has been declining steadily as a result. For many the tipping point hasn't been reached yet even though they are fed up.
The problem with brand destruction is that it takes a long time to show up as in the revenue chart. But by the time it does a ton of damage has been done.
This seems to be the core of the discussion.
Is there a fundamental trust to have towards any of these corporation, and where do you go when they all breached the amount of trust you had in them ?
To give a parallel, it's like boycotting every airline that wronged you. Very quickly you have to revise your criteria.
Linux would be the exception as there's a path where you don't need to trust any organization, but I don't think it's practical for an average computer user.
While Ubuntu for instance is a good experience, you still need to trust Canonical. Granted it's a lot easier when it's OSS at its core and there's a whole community watching.
Correction: brand damage is dangerous for businesses that haven't reached the monopoly stage yet. Once they do, they no longer care about it.
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.
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.
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
You could liken it to the pay-to-win model in that Windows is dirt cheap if you’re not doing anything serious in it. But the moment you want something more business-ready, your costs are going to skyrocket.
This is no more the case with Win10.
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.
If you see it as first party, Minecraft Dungeons is also first party.
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.
Will Microsoft enshittify Windows? Yes, it already has.