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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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