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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: 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.
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