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Vista To Be An Indie Games Killer?
Via GigaGamez (which has a breakdown of the problem), a GameDaily article about the unfriendliness of Vista towards Indie games. The problem is this: Vista has a setting which allows parents to restrict user profiles from accessing ESRB games 'above' a certain rating. IE: Timmy can't play F.E.A.R., or any other 'M' rated game. The problem is that getting ESRB rated is expensive: '$2000-3000 for the privilege', according to GigaGamez. Shoestring budget Indie games just may not have the money for that kind of expenditure. From the GameDaily article: "'It's unfortunately a mercenary way of doing things,' [GFW Group Manager Chris Donahue] explains, 'but, even though we're Microsoft, we do have limited resources. And we do look at the sales charts to determine where our help will have the most impact. Certainly we want Blizzard's 'World Of Warcraft' [currently the most popular massive multiplayer online game] to work flawlessly on day one of Vista because 8 million tech support calls would be a very bad thing. The casual developers don't sell quite as many.'"
I thought any game could be installed on the system, just the ones that do not implement Vista's programming interface for their "game browser thingy" just gets installed like a normal app? Still can run it like a regular program, and play it like any other game.
Developing games for Vista/Xbox is considerably easier than any other platform in history. And honestly, how many parents are actually going to use this feature to restrict content based on ESRB rating? Probably close to zero.
More content, less whining please.
ÕÕ
Last time I checked, not all executables in Vista need to have an age-appropriateness rating. This means that participation in this whole ESRB-rating-encoded-thing is entirely voluntary, which I expect all the big players to follow. How does this impact Indies, who still don't need ESRB ratings and can still run fine on Vista?
If you're large enough that you're selling from the shelves of Wal Mart, then perhaps you *should* invest in an ESRB rating so you can be mainstreamed.
Personally, I suspect that 8 Million users will upgrade to Burning Crusade within weeks/months whereas few will move towards Windows Vista because Burning Crusade has added value.
In my personal experience, it seems like Windows lack of focus on gaming is largely in response to the videogame industry reducing emphasis on PC gaming; there are very few games that are released for the PC in a given year that will not find their way to a console. The (interesting) thing is that this could kill Windows as being the dominant platform (or at least being as dominant of a platform) as Vista is adopted because the main reason people choose Windows over Mac OSX or Linux is that Windows has way more games available.
The solution is easy: Make options available to choose alternate rating systems and/or hand pick games.
With the (pending) inclusion XBox Live Marketplace to Vista, parental controls could be accepted as a necessary features (at least for those who want to control their children). Yet I'm not sure Microsoft will include those flexibility options.
I just hope developers quit requiring admin access for games to run properly. I have admin access, but I don't want to give it to my wife and kids. It's always a hassle to configure a game so that it works for my wife and kids. The edutainment games are the worst!
I can't see that as a bad thing, frankly. If indie games start showing up natively in Linux out of necessity, it might create an atmosphere where:
Granted, this doesn't mean that AAA titles will show up right away, but, given point #2, it might convince some developers apart from id and Epic to hit Linux with a native client for their games.
Plus, does anybody remember when Doom was an indie game and sold PCs? The bar has been raised, of course, but our tools have also become much more sophisticated in the interim.
C
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.
Yeah, huge constitutional crisis and massive civil rights violation akin to asking Rosa Parks to go to the back of the bus. Whatever. Oh, and M$ is evil, etc. etc.
Does anyone really believe that Vista will be so secure that this "feature" cannot be circumvented by kids? Kids often figure out how to defeat most of these applications including things like Deep Freeze, let alone crap like Net Nanny.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not just for games, but for all applications. I can't believe how many poorly coded applications I have come across that require Admin access to run properly but have absolutely no need for administrative rights.
"...because 8 million tech support calls would be a very bad thing. " Only because over 80% of initial support calls are handled by Offshore Outsourcing partners, who rely on pre-scripted soutions on flashcards. Prior to 2001, the outsourcers were dilligently trained and were able to troubleshoot in a linear and logical fashion. Although not a perfect system (to misquote Orwell, "All techs are created equal, however some techs are more equal than others..."), this at least allowed Launch Day to proceed at a low level of panic. Been there, done that, outgrew the t-shirt they give you....
The primary audience for these games, believe it or not, is something like 30+ year old women. It's not surprising, actually, when you consider what type of games these are. And yes, many of these small titles are created by small dev houses with very small budgets, especially if you compare them against your typical EA game.
I agree that it may be more difficult to get an ESRB rating, and I think that's a requirement if you want to be in the "Games Browser" in Vista. I would hope that the ESRB comes up with a tiered plan so that smaller titles, which shouldn't take nearly as long to test as say, Grand Theft Auto, have a cheaper option.
That said, if I were an indie developer, I would much rather spend the $2,000 - 3,000 it takes to get an ESRB rating than to go Linux, since that demographic in no way matches my current audience (30+ year old women).
-- jchenx
This is just Microsoft's way of making sure there will be enough desktop support people available to support it's OSes in the furture. Could there be a better training ground for our future IT professionals than having to tweak Vista and work around its restrictions so they can make the games they want to play work?
"Never limit what you know to what you do", Me
Vista, as the parent wrote may be "easier" to develop for than any other platform in history -- but just like a paint-by-numbers book is easier to use than a set of oil paints and a canvas - that doesn't mean it's a better platform for games.
Windows got it's strengths back in 3.1 and 95 and 98 *BECAUSE* it gave developers direct access to the capabilities of the underlying machines (including full kernel mode privileges and direct hardware access). Other OS's around at the time (Mac, BSD, Linux) were burdened by anoying things like security and abstraction layers protecting the hardware and kernel from the software.
Seems that now Vista's left with the worst of both worlds - rigidly enforced APIs that destroy their old strenghts; but years to go on the learning curve to making a secure stable OS.
So yes, it's easy to make the exact game that Visual Studio's demo program makes. But no, that doesn't make it a good platform for more serious developers.
My prediction is that the further Windows tries to get into the business server space, the worse and worse they'll be at gaming until finally game developers will say "screw the OS, we'll ship liveCDs" and the future gaming development environment will be libraries targeting Wintel architecture directly and not some OS layer at all.
I notice that your item 1. "The community puts more effort into supporting game developers on Linux (tools, API, etc)", mentions nothing about actually *buying* the games! Your "support" goes for tools, but not buying games. The notion of paying for software is anathema to Linux users. Why in the hell would a game developer target a community that not only refuses to pay for software, but also condones piracy (see the constant rants against any and all attempts at copy protection of software), and demands not only the source code, but the right to compile the code (altered or not), and distribute the code and compiled programs to others for free?
AAA games take millions of dollars to produce. Can you guarantee that the Linux community will *buy* games in sufficient numbers to cover the cost?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
If Timmy's mommy knows how to turn the parental thing on, she knows how to turn it back off. If Timmy notices he can't play games he should well be able to play, he will bitch and complain as only children can, and this will get it turned off.
Indie game designers, here's an idea: Write that hot new game for Linux and release it as a bootable LiveCD using the Linux distro of your choice. Runs on allkinda hardware (even that crufty old pre-Vista stuff still choking the basements and game rooms of the world), avoids the performance penalty of running Vista (Hoo-boy! More system resources for the game to use!), and allows you to know EXACTLY what the operating system is and what video drivers and other critical system resources are running, so you can concentrate on the game. No worries about "Did MS break our game with the last patch?" or the like. OS compatibility gets very simple. Hardware compatibility is simplified, too: games normally only need CPU, video, network, some disk, and keyboard/mouse/game controller.
True, there are complications to this strategy, notably in terms of network setups, video settings, custom or updated drivers, savegames, and other persistent data that users will want to have on hand, but these are all resolvable in relatively simple ways. Build a Windows "setup" utility that sets up a directory on the user's existing disk partitions for use by the LiveCD, and/or provide a USB flash drive for persistent data storage. The USB key can even be used as a physical license key, as some of them have built-in crypto.
This obviously isn't THE solution for game designers who don't want to kowtow to Microsoft, but it IS a WORKABLE and PRACTICAL solution, and it does have advantages that make it attractive.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
That is one side of indie game development, but there are hundreds of real, innovative indie games out there, that are just as valid as Doom or any other big budget game out there. Look around for them. You will suprised.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
Mac OS X users pay for software, and in fact studies have shown that they (on the average per individual consumer) spend more on software than MS-Windows users. Plus, it already had decent (and free) development tools available for it. Wouldn't that make it the natural environment for indie games?
30+ years old women need ESRB approved games? WTF?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
"Certainly we want Blizzard's 'World Of Warcraft' [currently the most popular massive multiplayer online game] to work flawlessly on day one of Vista because 8 million tech support calls would be a very bad thing. The casual developers don't sell quite as many.'"
Did he just say that?
Oh wow... new low, thats like a big "SCREW YOU INDIE!" in the face of every indie developer.
Anyway, i'm sure this won't be a problem anyway, unless they HAVE to be rated (and its turned on by default), yeh that'll mean even more than 8 milli..wait, no, vista won't even sell that in a year or 2.. what am i thinking??
Not a good idea, a live CD uses a fairly high amount of ram. Even if we somehow got around that somehow, many computers aren't set to boot from the CD drive, so what is joe sixpack going to think when he needs to go to BIOS to play a game?
Some people encrypt by using rot-13 twice. I prefer the more secure method of using rot-1 a total of twenty six times.
Or it could recognize the presence of "game engine" libraries, such as SDL, Allegro, ClanLib, and the DirectX import libraries, and use heuristics to mark some executables as "games".
As an independant games developer, I'm honestly not all that concerned. Here are a few reasons why:
1) Most people probably won't even turn the protection system on.
2) You can make specified games exempt, or enable them per user.
3) If it becomes that big of an issue, the system is able to support other ratings boards. An Indie-focused organization could be set up to rate games using volunteers and accept donations from indie devs and individuals.
Yes, its a minor hassle. So is the migration to the LUA model. I think we can all agree that both moves are good.
It is obviously a Microsoft conspiracy to perpetuate their monopoly and keep Linux down.
Microsoft could have built in functionality for parents to allow use of TIGRS self-certification, just as it built support for PICS labels generated by ICRA's form into IE.
Unless Windows Vista uses some sort of heuristic to determine what is a game and what is not. If a program calls Direct3D, DirectSound, and DirectInput, then it's probably a game.
Trouble is that if some alternate rating system isn't turned on at installation time, too many parents will just boycott games not rated by ESRB because they believe that any publisher that does not use the ESRB process has something to hide.
Every copy protection system these days requires a kernel driver - otherwise Daemon Tools would win every time. Installing a kernel driver requires administrator privileges for obvious reasons. Some retailers refuse to put unprotected games on the shelves.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Just what i was going to bring up there.
Biggest problem is simply not knowing how a persons computer will work at boot
The driver problems will be big as well, i've certainly seen some problems with people getting networking working well with some routers and modems, modems especially, i mean there must be well over a 1000 modems (models included) all around the world.
Drivers are probably one of the biggest problems with this idea. If a GROUP of people were to get together to make pre-formatted images, then that could be good (i've seen this being discussed before with some developers), but theres just been no "push" towards it (who knows, maybe Vista will be that push)
As for liveCDs using alot of RAM, not all of them do, plus we can treat it in the same sense as any game, you install some of it on the drive and/or cache.
Just because we are using Windows, doesn't mean we can't use the drive. Most gamers purchasing indie developed games would be pretty computer literate with things like installing and hard drive management, enough to know what caching is at least (and if not, explain!)
Actually, one other problem would also be distribution. Not alot of indie developers would like that.
A compressed download is usually better than discs in most indie developers eyes, but its kind of a good/bad situation both ways.
Its always best to offer both, if you can afford to.
Eh who knows, we'll see if Vista is a bitch for all us indie developers out there.
Unless a significant fraction of parents look at the lack of an ESRB rating and imagine that the publisher has something to hide.
This worked back in the early PC days when everyone had a CGA, but nowadays, everyone has a different 3D video card and a different wireless network card. Including the drivers on the disc has a problem: a lot of the peripheral makers aren't very conducive to including the drivers on the setup disc without a hefty royalty. Requiring the user to reboot has a problem: many gamers have developed the expectation that they can play in a window and run things in the background such as instant messaging software or TeamSpeak IP conference calling software.
Build a Windows "setup" utility that sets up a directory on the user's existing disk partitions for use by the LiveCDWindows Vista has heuristics to detect "setup" programs and require the user to run them with an administrator password. And how would this work on a file system using a variant of NTFS that the latest version of Linux does not understand?
and/or provide a USB flash drive for persistent data storage. The USB key can even be used as a physical license key, as some of them have built-in crypto.That would work for a boxed game, but what about the gratis downloadable demo? Besides, by the time you are big enough to sell boxed games, you are big enough to afford the $3,000 for an ESRB rating.
Well, for starters, point #1 was really aimed at the lack of an analog to DirectX on the Linux front. Yes, there's OpenGL and OpenML and OpenAL, but they're not a combined effort the way DirectX has Direct3D and DirectSound (and DirectInput and DirectNetwork and DirectEtc, Etc). The lack of truly portable APIs that are easy to work with and that work well together is a big problem for games development under Linux. It doesn't look like a solution has even been started, or that the community believes that such a solution is even necessary.
Second, the millions you want to recoup are outside the realm of indie games. That's why they're indie games to begin with. I agree that Linux users expect more direct access to the software for free, but that doesn't mean that software isn't sold on Linux. Far from it, in fact. The problem is that, until now, Linux has not been a user desktop / OS, and that has hindered the sale of end-user apps. As another poster pointed out, Mac users are more than happy to pay for software. There's no reason to not have a Linux version of your app if you have a MacOS version (except for Cocoa, which Apple is stupidly withholding when it could open it up and grow the size of their market by letting Linux developers hit their APIs, but that's a different rant for a different day). Anyway, my point is that you won't necessarily convince Linux users to shell out $50+ for a game, but an indie game should probably go for less, anyway. I think you *could* sell software to Linux users if the price was right.
Hell, I paid for CrossoverOffice! Not everyone that uses Linux (or, as in my case, wishes they could use it more than they already do) is dead opposed to paying for software.
Your points, however, are well taken.
C
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.
According to the article summary the cost of ESRB certification is three thousand dollars. If you can't come up with three grand are you really all that serious about making money developing computer games?
Too bad Vista doesn't offer other built-in features: Web-filtering for always-on internet connections, the porn collection on the hard drive, R rated movies going in the DVD drive, etc. etc.
Then finally parents will have a computerized baby sitter to replace the TV.
You could probably write that same game in a day for Windows (or using any other of the many APIs out there.) It only gets harder if you decide to develop more complicated games (which newer platforms allow you to do.)
This is probably an optional check just like Administrator rights. If you don't have an ESRB rating -- or even if you do -- just don't ask Windows what the filter is set to, and you can install/run on any machine you please.
Oh, I'm not doubting the fact that there are a lot of non-casual indie games and developers. But I don't think that's what the original article was referring to. It mentions "casual games" several times.
-- jchenx
tell me why as a gamer I want to turn my dual core PC into an XBox Live arcade console.
tell me why as an indie developer I shouldn't be programming in XNA for both the XBox 360 and Windows platforms.
tell me why I want to spend my hard earned money stamping out disks, programming flash ROM and packaging a product that will be buried at retail beneath Madden and The Sims.
tell me how I sell the LiveCD in a market that is moving to online distribution. the hard disk install that launches from a desktop icon.
I did a quick google and it looks like nobody has tried to play Doom 1 or 2 on Vista yet. Kinda depressing from a "state of kids today" standpoint. Hopefully the newer source ports with opengl work fine.
Certainly we want Blizzard's 'World Of Warcraft' [currently the most popular massive multiplayer online game] to work flawlessly on day one of Vista because 8 million tech support calls would be a very bad thing.
You'd only have at the most, 7,999,999 tech support calls. I'll never upgrade to Vista, and I'm a WoW player. I don't see the need to upgrade something when it's finally relatively stable, especially when it comes with a hefty pricetag. "New features and security" doesn't interest me at all when it already took several years for the appropriate patches/updates to surface to fix the XP vulnerabilities. Now all of the script kiddies will be exploiting the Vista holes, so maybe they'll leave XP alone for a while (but I doubt it.)
And they said zombies weren't real!
First, the restriction system is opt in.
Second, I'm pretty sure that if little Timmy is bought FEAR by his parents (after all, he won't be able to buy it himself), then all mom and pop have to do is either approve the game (probably enter their user name + password), or set the bar a little lower. And how hard is it going to be to have a note in with the game that details for people intalling it what to do if windows complains about running an unrated game.
Hell, the game browser system is opt in anyway, if a program does not register itself (or is detected as, the game browser can identify games), then the rating will not be checked at all, as windows wll just think it is a regular program.
Personally, I feel that this "feature" should not be needed at all. This sort of protection should be done 1) at the videogame counter and 2) by the parents not buying these games on their behalf. However, as election time in America approaches, I can see more and more of your Senators heading down the "GAMEZ ARE EVIL LOL AND MUST BE BANZORED ON THE BEHALFS OF THE PARENTS".
Just goes to prove that it doesn't take much for Slashdot to start whining about Vista. Not even true accusations are necessary.
Vista has Lunix and Apple fans yellowing their underwear. Now that they will be completely and totally losing the gamer brainshare... there is simply no reason to care about either OS X or Lunix.
Does this feature need to be turned on in Vista? Maybe all of my friends with kids are bad parents or something, but most prefer to be involved with their childs playing rather than relying on some kind of restrictive mechanism such as this to stop them playing certain games. Nor would many kids that age go out of their way to find Indie games. This is all a bit overrated I feel.
hellboy
Fourtheye - Australian Tool News
Games that use Steam (such as half-life 2) dont require any funky CD based copy protections (I havent seen it myself but I would imagine that the retail boxed HL2 is just an offline copy of the protected data files steam would download to your local disk and then install)
Please do also mention what was "state of the art" back then. You could actually land a success with a text based game in those days. Text adventures (I've written quite a few of them) are rather easy to do, from a code level, the "work" is to create the game world. Zork was a huge hit, and it had zero graphics.
Today, you couldn't even create a web game with that content that interests more than a few die-hard text adventure devotees. No matter how good the story or how tough the puzzles.
That's what you need the team for. You need eye candy, you need good sound, you need realistic physics (or, if you do it comic style, a good artist) and so on. That's where you sink so many manhours in today's games.
On the other hand, if you did "graphics oriented" games in the days of yore, you pretty much had to get down to Assembler to get anything sensible done. And I doubt that you want to argue that writing Assembler is easier than writing it in some language like C#, no matter how bad the architecture may be (let's be honest here, the x86 arch is maybe the most illogical way you could organize it).
So it does get easier, from a language level. We have a lot of very good tools at our hands today. On the other hand, the expectations from the client are considerably higher today, even a shareware game pretty much has to offer at least decent graphics to be played for more than a minute.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In other news, PICS support in Internet Explorer has killed the online pornography industry, and DRM has succeeded in eradicating piracy.
The whole concept of "ratings" is basically an anti-competitive move against "independents" in any industry. This is merely an extension of that problem. Fees have always been used to lockout shoestring independent films (for example) from MPAA ratings. This is no different. The fees are meant to help alleviate the cost of the ESRB, which is presumably funded by other means. The fees should be waived for "small" games (games that sell less thatn 50,000 copies). As for free games the ESRB should, on it's own initative, obtain and review these games posting reviews on the websites allowing free vendors to easily attach ratings. Sure it will be an expense, but isn't the ESRB supposed to be about customer service anyway?
Well, for starters, point #1 was really aimed at the lack of an analog to DirectX on the Linux front. Yes, there's OpenGL and OpenML and OpenAL, but they're not a combined effort the way DirectX has Direct3D and DirectSound (and DirectInput and DirectNetwork and DirectEtc, Etc).
There is SDL, which is what most Linux games seem to get created under these days and is quite portable. It should be possible to create abstraction interfaces for OpenGL and the other libraries mentioned to avoid having to code directly to any external API, although this would likely cause a performance decrease. The Allegro library is also portable, handles more internally, and may even cover all the bases you mentioned these days. SDL is rather simpler to work with and install though, and it seems faster under X11 from my experience. Not to mention that SDL is more or less ubiquitous on Linux distributions.
In any case, there are certainly portable APIs under which one can write games. More work could go into it, but I have no doubt that it will.
GPL: Free as in will
By all accounts this is an "opt-in" feature in MS Windows, which means that a very low number of parents will actually know about the feature and an even lower number will use it. Also, Windows must obviously have a way of setting which executables can be run, regular applications which presumably do not have any rating, won't be able to run. Thus parents can enable indie games on an individual basis in the few cases where this affects them.
I predict that the impact on indie games will be minimal.
Write that hot new game for Linux and release it as a bootable LiveCD using the Linux distro of your choice.
Great idea. Except that distributing binary-only drivers along with the kernel may be a violation of the kernel author's copyright, so the entire scheme is probably illegal. Unlike just filling in the ESRB rating field in your game's info structure with incorrect information, which would be perfectly legal (as long as you include text along with it to point out that the rating is unofficial).
... kernel author's ...
I mean "kernel authors'", obviously.
Big companies gotta have 'admin access so that they can install drm trojans on your machine without your permission and sometimes your knowledge as well. Look at what Sony was caught doin. StarForce is another example. It was reportedly found by some to hinder hard drive access especially on XP systems, and really interfered with the operation of CD and DVD burners. Many games installed it and told no one, and had no notices anywhere that it was there doing its deadly work. Go to 'boycott starforce' sites on the internet to find out which games are really trojans. Some companies have even been forced to take this out of their products. The lists are constantly updated so need to be checked often. These lists are printable so kids can keep a copy of the list in their pockets to check while shopping. Other games like the Russian IL/2 Gold were a lot nicer and put out a window and asked first for permission. The real Sturmovik (Illiyushin-2) was one of the best planes ever produced in what we called 'World War II' and what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. It had a really good anti-tank gun aboard. Maybe some gamer will find one in an old backyard somewhere around Mari El or Kursk or Vyazma and go find the StarForce people....drream on dreamer! The StarForce folks are nowhere near as bad as the evil monopolists that paid them to produce it then installed it in their media monopolists' products. I wonder how they feel making things to promote monopolism and corporate fascism when their country fought and lost over 20 millions to defeat corporate fascism and state fascism. Their parents must be turning over in their graves.
Ignorance comes through pretty loud, doesn't it :( I've been programming on Windows for most of my professional work, and the stuff that I do on Linux is all Java.
Thanks very much for this information. I had no idea about this library nor that it had been around for almost 10 years already.
C
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.
*shrug* Everyone has their areas of familiarity, I just happened to have worked on various projects using both frameworks. Often in conjunction with Windows developers. They work on several platforms one might not suspect, SDL works with BeOS and Allegro will even do DOS (well, it did when I last used it anyway.)
GPL: Free as in will
True. But if an executable opens a big fat GDI dialog box before it opens Direct3D or OpenGL, then it's likely to be either dxdiag, 3dmark, or some other benchmarking program.
It's not entirely reasonable for Microsoft to demand you to send the name and MD5 of your executable just for the purpose of indentification.Then what's this signed driver initiative in Windows Vista 64? What are WHQL and the "Games for Windows" logo program?
Basically, this heuristic would basically boil down to "if it uses anything besides the extremely basic Win32 APIs, and it's NOT on this list of excluded executables, it's probably too funny and has to be rated."You appear to be arguing from lack of imagination: "tepples and WWWWolf cannot think of a good heuristic; therefore, a good heuristic cannot exist." Microsoft pays its developers to research more robust heuristics than what I have time to think up in these Slashdot comments.
(Meanwhile, the games that are developed using the aforementioned extremely basic Win32 APIs get away with no paranoia.)Games that use basic Win32 APIs are more likely to be E or E10+ (minesweeper, solitaire, etc.) than M.
This sort of heuristic would produce so many false positives that MS would dump it in the next patch and just say "set this bit inThat's exactly what Microsoft is doing in Game Explorer, as far as I can tell: adding a recommended minimum age field and rating authority field to the PE metadata. Heuristics would be used only on programs without a rating.
But none of this is an issue for parents who are not overprotective.
There is Payback, a GTA1/2 clone for GBA with amazing software 3D graphics, available everywhere but North America. DSI Games has dragged its feet on publishing it in North America for some reason that the company has not disclosed.