There’s now one less reason to visit the Microsoft Store – free Instant Games have been scrapped (though they didn’t help the platform much anyway)

Thursday at 02:39 PM

Instant Games has been ditched nine months after it went live
The feature let you instantly play arcade games without installing them
It’s the ability to play instantly that’s scrapped, not the games themselves

Early in 2024, Microsoft started rolling out ‘Instant Games’ to its store in Windows 11, but the feature has come off the rails – and is now being scrapped.

The idea with Instant Games was to give Windows 11 users another reason to visit the Microsoft Store, allowing them to enjoy some quick-and-easy casual games that didn’t need to be downloaded or installed.

Yes, these were free games you could play on your PC there and then – instantly – with no fuss around setting them up.

Okay, so as you might imagine, they were just simple arcade or puzzle-style casual games – they were housed under the ‘Arcade’ tab in the Microsoft Store’s side panel menu, in fact – but still, they were free, and very easy to access.

At the last count, there were close to 70 games that could be instantly played using the feature in the Microsoft Store.

It seems the feature simply wasn’t very popular, though, because as Windows Latest reports, Microsoft has now canned Instant Games, as of today (November 14). The games themselves aren’t going anywhere, we should note; it’s just that the only option will be to download them going forward – there’s no instant play button anymore.

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(Image credit: Windows Latest / Microsoft)

Analysis: Stumbling blocks that led to derailment

As Windows Latest points out, one of the frustrations with Instant Games was that it took a long time to roll out to everyone on Windows 11. Rather ironically, the delivery was anything but instant, as the idea was announced in September 2023, but as noted, the rollout didn’t begin until early 2024 (in February). And even when it did kick off, the feature was slow to be rolled out to Windows 11 users.

That probably didn’t help, and going by reports, there was another stumbling block with Instant Games. While the convenience of just clicking and playing a game there and then was great, running the title directly within the Microsoft Store was seemingly quite resource-intensive. Anecdotally, things could be less than smooth when running these arcade titles, even though they are by their very nature much less demanding than you’re the best PC games.

Granted, the level of smoothness doubtless depended on your PC (and Windows) configuration, but still – there were issues here by all accounts. Although to be fair, the feature did still allow you to try out these casual games, and if you liked them, you could then fully download and install them, to get smoother gameplay.

Whatever the case, ultimately the Instant Games library couldn’t have got much traffic, otherwise Microsoft wouldn’t be shutting it down just nine months after the feature was sent live. The idea was to attract more users to the Microsoft Store – which needs all the help it can get – but the plan seems to have failed in this instance.

Microsoft is, however, very much continuing its efforts to make the Microsoft Store a better place, including ushering in a major visual revamp, and changes to boost performance in various ways, making the app more responsive and much quicker to boot.

None of which can hurt, but in the end, it’s the content that the store will live and die by, and Microsoft still has a lot of work to do in that respect…