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.'"

Re:Wait a minute...

[Babillon]

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.

Re:Will games still need admin access?

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to qualify for the Windows logo [microsoft.com], games need to allow being run from a limited user. It's 3.4 on that list.

So when buying games, CHECK FOR THE WINDOWS LOGO! It means that the game has to properly support limited user accounts, and generally has to meet certain quality requirements.

Developers have been required not to require admin rights at least since Windows XP came out. There's no excuse for any developer not to run without admin rights.

The only thing that might break with that is games that auto-update (like most MMORPGs). The update process might require admin privileges for obvious reasons. However the game should still run in a limited account.