Microsoft wrote their own Solitaire game back in the Windows 3 days. It's not complicated, there's no reason they couldn't have written their own non-tracking properly free game.

They had a little run-in with antitrust regulation some years ago and probably want to avoid it. They kept bundling their own stuff, often with favored access to undocumented APIs, and people stuck to those defaults.

If Candy Crush licensed its source code to Microsoft and Microsoft used that permission to remove all kinds of tracking and internet connectivity features from the game, then I wouldn't mind having it on my fresh Windows installation.

I can’t see that ever happening given that Microsoft puts those “features” into Windows itself.

The latter is a first-party app; I don't see how it's comparable.

s/solitaire/pinball/

The problem isn't really a third party game. It's that it's bulky and that it keeps coming back.