When Windows 10 landed in our PCs 7 years ago, among its many novelties there were also some undesirable ones, such as a significant increase in bloatware (third-party software pre-installed with the operating system). And among those unwanted programs, the jewel in the crown was the popular Candy Crush Saga.
The candy game, launched on the market in 2012, then came to Windows as part of an agreement between its development company, King (owned by Activision Blizzard), and Microsoft, by which the games of said franchise were also added to the Microsoft mobile application store.
Quickly, The Internet was filled with tutorials with tips on how to uninstall Candy Crush and the rest of pre-installed programs. Not even the fans of the game who had spent hours on it in its mobile and/or Facebook versions were in favor of its forced inclusion on their PCs.
In any case, Windows 10 installations remained synonymous with pre-installed ‘Candy Crush Saga’ for four years, until Microsoft announced in 2019 that the new update of its operating system, the 20H1, would arrive without most of the bloatware which the previous versions boasted, Candy Crush included.
In 2020, along with Candy Crush, applications such as Spotify, Photoshop Elements or Netflix also said goodbye to Windows 10
Furthermore, offering such a game had lost much of its meaning: his fame had been evaporating over the years, and Microsoft already had by this time given up on the market for mobile operating systems. So it seemed like the windowsers and the candy game parted ways at that point.
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Welcome back to Microsoft, Candy Crush: just like home
However, unexpectedly, today we learned that Microsoft becomes the new owner of Activision Blizzard and, with it, Candy Crush Saga (in addition to Call of Duty, Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, etc, of course). And a question arises, will Candy Crush Saga land again on Windows?
At the end of the day, let’s remember that ‘bloatware’ isn’t just “unsolicited software”—many of us haven’t requested Paint3D or WordPad, and they’re not bloatware—but it has to be “third party” as well. And what things As of today, Candy Crush Saga is no longer third-party software, but Microsoft as well as Minesweeper or Solitaire, games as simple and popular as that one, whose pre-installation in Windows has never generated controversy.
So how will Microsoft take advantage of its ownership of Candy Crush? You may not even have to install it on your operating system, now that you’ve decided to somewhat randomly extend the functionality of your Microsoft Edge browser, even could make it available to its users in its new ‘game bar’, which gives access to the MSN Games platform, which already offers Microsoft Jwel, its own ‘clone’ of Candy Crush —in turn, let’s remember, a clone of Bejeweled—.