Vista To Be An Indie Games Killer?

Posted by Zonk on Thursday January 18, 2007 @06:29AM from the argh-my-toblo dept.

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.'"

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What else we need... by Maximegalon · 2007-01-18 08:41 · Score: 2, Funny

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.