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Comment by adito | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering why newer OS doesn't bundle games with their default installation anymore? Even on smartphone. I remember on old dumb phone (nokia I think), you can play snake and some racing game. It even has multiplayer via bluetooth.

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That would be doing something nice for the user at the expense of doing slightly less funneling traffic to their app store where they make their money on adtech and access fees.

We wouldn't want to leave any money on the table in the pursuit of a better product, would we?

Space Cadet (Pinball) has the most direct answer: it was written largely in x86 assembler and didn't survive a 64-bit translation attempt. Raymond Chen says the ball would ghost off the table, fall down and end the game in seconds when trying to run in 64-bit math. Raymond even takes personal responsibility for the failure to keep Space Cadet alive and disappointment it didn't survive past Windows XP:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160205141748/https://blogs.msd...

The larger answer to the rest of the games seems to be related: Windows trying to shrink its non-cross platform code "liabilities" and things it needed to translate between processor architectures. The games were never a priority for the Windows team. Most were either intern projects and/or contracted from "second party vendors". In Windows 8, Microsoft decided to completely contract all of the games to a second party, the strange and sometimes controversial Arkadium [1]. The Arkadium Solitaire and Minesweeper were installed by default for a while, but as Arkadium started injecting more ads and also quickly increasing the install sizes of the games, Microsoft did the natural thing and removed them as default installs so people would stop complaining about their size and/or ads and instead just adding shortcuts to install them from the Store.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkadium

Please describe the precise ROI with $1M in research and studies, that will show an OS vendor will make a profit on such bundles.

(I can't imagine any other reason why, except maybe bug reports)

I remember kids begging their parents to play Brick Breaker on their parents blackberries. Of course this was before young children having iPads was normalized

Google play games comes with a offline copy of snake, solitaire, minesweeper, and a few others. I'm not sure if that's bundled with phones or not, and the games are kinda hidden. I only found out about them because they come up if you try to search Google play without a connection.

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