With General Availability of Windows 8 just five days away another series of updates for the upcoming operating system were distributed this weekend.
Amongst the collection of updates were the long expected new versions of the following Xbox Live games:
- Mahjong
- Solitaire Collection
- Minesweeper
- Taptiles
All of these games now have gamerscore that can be earned through multiple achievements and these updates bring full leaderboards and daily challenges to each game. Leaderboards let you track your progress against your friends at each game and the daily challenges allow you to earn coins in several different modes in each game.
Here are some screenshots of what the update looks like in Mahjong which is similar to all the other games.
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Pretty straight forward but here is the one that I think is going to cause some churn out there in the tech world:
This is a screenshot of a 30 second commercial, an Xbox 360 game that uses Kinect, that you must view BEFORE you are allowed in to participate in the Daily Challenges.
Now I get the concept of a game being supported by ads – it happens every day on a lot of platforms. I am just curious what everyone thinks about the idea on your Windows OS.
Now this game and the others are optional downloads from the Windows Store so you do make a choice to run it on your system. They are also free and this is obviously the method they are supporting providing those games for free.
So if you choose to play these games are you OK with them being ad supported like this or would you prefer to see a paid version also be available that would remove the ads and video sponsorship?
Let me know in the comments below.
