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That giant sucking sound you hear is 30% of the world's productivity being sucked away:
In what is no doubt a sign that humanity as we know it is coming to a swift, unproductive end, Microsoft has announced that King's notoriously moreish Candy Crush Saga will come pre-installed with Windows 10. That's right, pre-installed. In what appears to be an entirely non-ironic post over at Xbox Wire, Microsoft says that "as an added bonus, Candy Crush Saga will automatically be installed for customers that upgrade to or download Windows 10 for periods of time following the game launch."
There's no word on whether you'll be able to opt out of the automatic install, although it's likely King will want to get as many people as possible hooked on Candy Crush given its recent financial struggles. Earlier today, the company's shares fell as much as 14 percent in after-hours trading after it issued a profit warning. It noted in its first quarter financials that revenue was lower than expected due to slowing Candy Crush sales, and players moving to "more mature games."
I dropped Candy Crush a year ago when they got cute with roadblocks that force you to spend money, but maybe this will be the Minesweeper of Win10?
(Score: 1, Troll) by mtrycz on Saturday May 16 2015, @10:19AM
SpyOS preinstalled with spyware, move along, nothing to see here.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @01:57PM
What the fuck is a Candy Crush? Why the fuck doesn't the goddamn useless summary tell us what the fuck a Candy Crush is. Come on. Fix the fucking summary.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by mtrycz on Saturday May 16 2015, @02:50PM
I would generally agree with a short introduction to the domain of the article, but c'mon, it's like asking what an iPhone is. There's reasonable expectation that everybody knows.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @09:00PM
No, it's totally different. An iPhone is widely known because it's a product that's widely used by people of all ages, widely advertised, and has been available for almost a decade now. This Candy Crush crap is just a relatively obscure game that's been out for maybe two or three years, and is played pretty much only by hipsters. Most of us here at SN aren't hipsters. While we know about long-lasting, massively successful commercial products spanning all age groups and demographics, we don't know about today's trendy shit, which will most likely be completely forgotten by next week. That's why the summary should tell us what this obscure, hipster trend-driven shit is all about.
(Score: 1) by Dr Spin on Saturday May 16 2015, @08:19PM
Its when you have a crush on a girl called Candy (Like I did when I was in school).
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday May 17 2015, @02:17AM
If you have a smartphone, you certainly have heard of Candy Crush. For everything else, there's Google.
But it should have been evident from the summary that Candy Crush is a game, unless you also don't know what Minesweeper is.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @11:07AM
Doesn't anybody else remember that king ripped-off a small indie developer who made a game (the original game) that was dedicated to his dead mother? Anyone??
(Score: 3, Funny) by isostatic on Saturday May 16 2015, @11:34AM
Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert. What next, Candy Crush Navigation Authority?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday May 16 2015, @01:00PM
In Canada, you cannot advertise yourself as an "Engineer" of any sort unless you're the Canadian equivalent of an American Professional Engineer. That goes for Software Engineers; a CS degree does not count, you need a Software Engineering degree, which is quite a different thing. You have to serve an apprenticeship, you need to pass an exam and I expect you have to be recommended by some licensed engineers.
Guess what the OSE does whenever a new MCSE certification school turns up in the great white north?
The OSE sues them, and they always win.
I once worked for an industrial control systems firm. The "engineers" worked on physical mechanisms, mostly ladder logic programs for PLCs. I was among the "Computer Programmers". I repeatedly referred to my colleagues as "The Engineers"; always they corrected me and said "No, the programmers".
If your industrial control systems product includes a half-million lines of source code, then the people who write that code are engineers, even if they don't want to be, and even if they are bad ones.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Troll) by VortexCortex on Saturday May 16 2015, @12:21PM
Candy Crush Saga? The game by King that trademarked "Saga" then went after indie gamedevs, even though their game is a ripoff of Candy Swipe? [forbes.com] (both are clones of Bejeweled, but come on look how similar Candy Crush is to Candy Swipe, it's uncanny). The shitty thing about the King dispute with "Banner Saga" [ign.com] is that this is an interesting looking strategy game about Vikings (whence comes the word Saga, so if anyone should be able to use the word it should be them). The trademark disputes were eventually settled, but not before the King douchebags threw their weight around after securing their position with gamed app rankings and marketing dollars... I can see why MS thinks they'd be good bedfellows.
Yet another reason not to use Win10 in my book. If I weren't a developer I wouldn't even have a VM image of that crap. I can almost do everything via cross compiler, except testing. I value customer choice (even shitty OS choice) over my political stance on software development (a true supporter of end-user freedom). The OS is irrelevant. Most Users don't buy hardware for the OS, their primary question is "what applications will work with this machine/OS". If all the applications are cross platform (and there really isn't a reason they couldn't be) then it won't matter which OS you have -- More specifically, users will be freer to go with an open source OS over a proprietary one. Cross platform development is easy if done from the outset, and goes a long way to reduce vendor lock-in of users and devs. MS is aiming for some cross platform things in ARM based Win10, but it's more about preventing them from being locked out of the Android ecosystem than enabling true cross platform development (for that you need a Meta Language that can compile into other languages...).
Winning developer exclusivity is a key to vendor lock-in, but a company built on shitty ripoffs won't last. MS was going to have some game installed by default, might as well be one that's "popular", to bad it won't be a better game. It's a shame that the moronic masses will buy into whatever crap is shilled the hardest. For instance, take that Flappy Birds game that was all the rage for a while. Its ratings were obviously gamed, and reviews had a ton of similar strange language about "life destroying" and "satan", like the botnet was using Markov chains to construct the reviews from a too-small dataset. The app was pulled quickly, probably to keep too many people from looking into how it got famous. Neither the Flappy Bird's dev nor the app stores want you to know that app rankings are easily gamed... and look how the media ran with it: Flappy Birds is great! They swooned over this incomplete rip-off of another game that had even used stolen art assets from Super Mario Bros. in it. Once this shitty game proved the botnet worked, people all over the place started downloading it to see what all the fuss was about, and they went along with the herd giving it praise, fitting in with the trendy hipster "game journalists" who praised the "beauty of the game's simplicity" and touted it as an example that any indie in their mom's basement can still make a big hit -- The implication being that it's a mystery how such a crappy game became so popular. "Viral trends are just so weird", no, not really, in fact guerrilla marketing companies exist that will sell "viral" for your product(s).
The same goes for this Candy Crush Saga game. It's shit. Even if you like simple puzzle games there really are much better games to play than this, there are even ones that are very similar to Candy Crush and better than it. FFS, it's like people won't even use a search engine nowadays, [indiedb.com] most will just take what's sitting in front of them and be satisfied, like so many cattle grazing on digital grass. I guess I just find it all kind of sad, really. MS could be making a deal to license an interesting game from any of the thousands of small gamedevs rather than this mass produced garbage from a corporate ripoff factory. Consumers today really will just eat whatever crap you tell them is popular, and love it. Games like Candy Crush Saga and Flappy Bird are the video game equivalent of Vaporwave [bandcamp.com] (which is performance art trolling in the form of low-effort music pretending to be produced by soul crushing corporations of the cyberpunk future for consumerist trash who don't know any better -- the fact that some hipsters actually like it is hilarious, if predictable). Hmm, that gives me an idea. If you see a gaudy cyan and magenta CGA-retro themed Skinner Box wonderland with 80's-esque audio "aesthetics" and "addictive" gameplay being pre-installed on Windows Infinite to universal praise of tech media, then my mission was a success. [itch.io]
(Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Saturday May 16 2015, @12:24PM
Ah, here's the link I forgot questioning the strangeness of Flappy Birds stats. [bluecloudsolutions.com]
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday May 16 2015, @02:04PM
I've watched people play Candy Crush obsessively and I've noticed that it seems to operate like a state machine [wikipedia.org] in a convolution [wikipedia.org]. This is very similar to the operation of Boulder Dash [wikipedia.org] which itself has many clones including one which is humorously called Riptoff [wikipedia.org].
Although it is possible to complicate the algorithm, the core of a Boulder Dash type game is compact to the extent that there is an IOCCC entry which implements it within 2KB of C.
1702845791×2
(Score: 3, Insightful) by iwoloschin on Saturday May 16 2015, @12:43PM
Didn't Apple try this with U2? Give away free shit...well...more cram it down our throats while saying, "Look what awesome things we do for you!"
If I remember correctly, the backlash there really didn't work out in their favor. Maybe they should stop giving away free shit.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Tork on Saturday May 16 2015, @08:19PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday May 17 2015, @10:04AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Sunday May 17 2015, @10:13AM
Not sure I get why this was 'Troll'
It's OK, Tork. We get that you do not get why things are modded "troll". But if it is any consolation, it usually is because the post is a troll even if you do not understand it. Hope this clears things up. Feel free to ask for assistance the next time you do not understand a mod.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday May 17 2015, @07:26PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @01:12PM
Why is this news? PCs have come with a wide variety of pre-installed crapware for decades. Some branded by the PC company, others independent titles. What's next, "Windows comes with 1's and 0's pre-installed! When will the madness end?!?!"
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday May 18 2015, @07:55AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @02:14PM
It kinda fits with Microsoft's mentality of Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein OS.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2015, @08:28PM
I had that idea years ago. But I called it SimDeathDamp. Had some good ideas for game mechanics and layout. Building guard towers, V2 rocket facilities, garment facilities, barracks, gas chambers etc. Then you had to deal with conditions in the camp and how productive you were. Surprise inspections from Himmler or other SS officials would cause them to be impresses or dissapointed in your camps progress and conditions which would result in bonuses such as delivery of more untermensch or bonus buildings or money. Disease breakouts could be treated medically or you quickly gassed the lot hoping it would not hurt production. I also wanted the studio name to be "DeathsHead Studios" and feature an SS-Totenkopf for the logo.
Yes, I know I'm going to hell.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Sunday May 17 2015, @08:27AM
+1 horrifically fascinating
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by looorg on Saturday May 16 2015, @02:25PM
So Microsoft is pre-installing what is possibly the most freemium of all freemium products with their new operating system. Are they getting some kind of kickback from KING (or whatever the maker is called these days) for this? I can already predict the sob articles about how little Timmy bought upgrades (or whatever they are called) on the family credit card that was already tied to the windows machine in some pre-install family friendly feature from your pals at Microsoft.
I'm not sure but I think this is the first time that this has been done with the windows leisure games that have come pre-installed, a pay 2 play feature for one companies product inside another companies product. Is this Microsoft testing the ground for people willing to pay for "extras" that will later be included in all other manner of products? Are we going to see Windows 10 DLC:s now to?