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.'"

On the other hand...

[duplicate-nickname]

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.

So, indie games -> Linux?

[CompSci101]

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:

1. The community puts more effort into supporting game developers on Linux (tools, APIs, etc.)
2. Linux begins to gain a reputation as a viable target for games (which it currently lacks)
3. Innovative games show up on Linux rather than Windows, possibly convincing people to convert

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

Re:Will games still need admin access?

[ruiner13]

Good point, but to play devil's advocate, more or less, take this situation. Since Vista requires authentication to even view network/firewall properties, what is a limited user going to do when the game needs to open a port to play online? There needs to be a good way to handle this, better than the current approach. In XP, you get a dialog that something is trying to open a port, and asks if it should be opened. The problem is that most of the time, the game is full-screen and you don't see the message until you quit the game after trying to get online and thinking the game is broken or your network crapped out. In any case, to open the port, I assume you need some sort of elevated permissions, which some users may not be.

It's all about the copy protection

[Myria]

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.

People use these features?

[hellboy1975]

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.

Re:It's all about the copy protection

[jonwil]

Terchnically yes they do. The copy protection drivers are loaded every time the game starts up and loading a kernel driver is one thing that (IIRC) requires administrator access.

Maybe microsoft can work with the copy protection companies and the games companies to come up with an answer so that copy proetction can continue to be secure but can function correctly in vista limited user mode without needing administrator access after the software has been installed.