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I'm going to need some independent confirmation. If this is true it's beyond parody.

Edit: welp.




The standard Windows Solitaire game is littered with ads - which you can disable for $2.49/month.


I'd love to see the market demographics behind these games - gut says its elderly who forget about the subscription entirely.

GameDevs who build games for such demographics should feel bad for preying on them.


My grandfather was happily playing card games (as well as using productivity software) on a DOS machine up until he passed in 2011. For the most part, I don't understand modern software (despite working in it). That said, I personally eliminated all Microsoft products from my life a few years back and I wish more people could do the same.


Had to check the date to make sure we weren’t related ;)

My grandpa passed away 5 years ago and still had a working Win95 box from the mid 90s that he used for card games.


Yeah, my grandpa was still using it with a dot matrix printer and some crazy old database program in order to send out mailers for some local community/political organization stuff.

But I get it - I’d still be running Windows 7 if they’d have just let it be.


Self-plug: play on https://FreeSolitaire.win — no ads until game over. You can install it, it’s a PWA (Progressive Web App).

It’s also available in the Microsoft Store: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/freesolitairewin/9p9s4fnp5... It was converted using https://pwa2uwp.fragara.com/


Plugs are welcome when they are backed with a great product. Really nice version of Solitaire. The only "bug" was that the double-clicking to move the cards to the stacks was really finicky (Chrome, Win11).

I wonder if you could get more donations by split-testing the end screen? I was thinking you should try putting a fixed dollar amount, like "Donate $2" instead of something open-ended that forces the user to think.


Oh, thanks a lot for such great feedback <3

About double-click on Win11: hmmm thanks, didn’t know about that. Will investigate as soon as I can put my hands on a Windows device.

About donations: great idea, indeed prompting with a fixed amount could be more performant.


Wow, that's really clean and snappy. I played on mobile, too. Great job!

From this thread, I played and beat Solitaire and Minesweeper on the first tries. I should buy a lotto ticket or something because today is my day.


Thank you!


I thought this couldn't be true, so I tried opening Solitaire and it popped up a Microsoft banner which said "Your free week of Premium starts today!" *crying face emoji*



From the copy: "Hang out with the iconic Minesweeper emoji in NEW Themes."

God, it must have sucked to work on this product.


Yeah, must've been a real minefield.



I enjoyed this 5 star review

"Fun to play, keeps you on your toes! The only problem is that every once in a while, you have to completely uninstall restart your computer and then reinstall, that's the only way you can keep playing."


Makes you pine for the good old days when you merely had to reboot the computer with your daily BSOD!


From that link (under the “MORE” tab): “This app can

Access your Internet connection

Access your Internet connection and act as a server.

Access your home or work networks”

I hope that’s a misconfiguration issue, and that it doesn’t ever act as a server, but who knows?


Looking at all those screenshots, I have no idea what this game even looks like. Is it 2D? 3D? Somehow less informative than the trailers they put in steam pages...

Also, oh my god, they changed the old :) icon to an emoji. This is worse than having ads or being pay to win.


I thought I was fast enough to fix it, but no...


Looks like I loaded the page just in time to see the old version. Sorry if it was fixed by then.


The solitaire one has been like that for.years now. It even shows full screen ads from time to time.


I just installed it, and it's legit (the Watch and Ad to continue playing part, at least).


What. Independent confirmation? Why do you want someone else to do things you can check yourself https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/microsoft-minesweeper...

Does everyone subscribe to WP:NOR in their own lives or something?


Microsoft has been beyond parody since Windows 8.




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