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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.'"
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.
This is absolutely true. Currently I have FlyFF, and Ragnarok Online both installed on my Vista system and there's no problem running them whatsoever. In fact, you don't even need to use the Games Explorer (I can't even find it in my start menu currently, or where it's located in Windows Explorer).
Vista is supposed to be the most indie developer friendly Windows yet, what with the new free tools Microsoft is providing (Visual Studio Express, XNA, DirectX, all of those free). And with XNA game development is supposed to be a good deal easier*.
Also... Isn't this story a dupe anyway? Weren't the guys at WildTangent whining about how their launcher wouldn't work in Vista because of this?
*I can't vouch for this, as I haven't used XNA, but Managed DirectX9 with C# wasn't particularly difficult to get the hang of, so here's hoping XNA is even easier.
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!
Reduce, reuse, cycle