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.'"

Wait a minute...

[revlayle]

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.

Does It Matter?

[p0tat03]

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.

Burning Crusade VS. Vista

[HappySqurriel]

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.

Will games still need admin access?

[dhalsim2]

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!

Re:On the other hand...

[giafly]

Developing games for Vista/Xbox is considerably easier than any other platform in history.

Back in the day, I developed state-of-the-art games for the Nascom Computer [wikipedia.org] in under a week. You would need a team of a hundred to do that on Vista/Xbox. Developing games gets harder with every new platform.

Devolping future IT talent

[CharliePete]

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?

Re:Will games still need admin access?

[sqlrob]

It's not just devs requiring the access, it's publishers. Copy protection is one of those that requires the access.

Re:It's all about the copy protection

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, installing requires admin rights. But why should running a game require admin rights? Games don't install kernal drivers every time they run.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anpheus]

There is _no_ market there. Games for linux would have to be free in order to achieve any popularity, and free just doesn't work as a good business model for games.

Re:On the other hand...

[DerekLyons]

Developing games for Vista/Xbox is considerably easier than any other platform in history.

Back in the day, I developed state-of-the-art games for the Nascom Computer in under a week. You would need a team of a hundred to do that on Vista/Xbox. Developing games gets harder with every new platform.

Of course the fact that the bar is steadily being raised in terms of graphics, physics, sounds, artwork, etc... has nothing to with development getting harder?