FileBlog: Will Vista Crush the Indie Gaming Scene?

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January 16, 2007

Will Vista Crush the Indie Gaming Scene?

After a series of delays, it's almost here: Windows Vista. While the release of a new Windows operating system is pretty exciting stuff for most people, a core group of casual and indie game developers are worried about what the new OS will mean for their business. Specifically, Microsoft's heavy-handed approach to installing and managing games. The outlook isn't too bad for large boxed retail products, which will be neatly categorized and organized by Vista in a special gaming area. But for small games, especially "Try-before-you-buy" shareware and demos, the new OS sets up plenty of roadblocks to make the experience as rough as possible.

Alex St. John, one of the architects of DirectX and now the CEO of casual gaming powerhouse WildTangent, published an essay about Vista in GamaSutra:

"We [WildTangent] have found many of the security changes planned for Vista alarming and likely to present sweeping challenges for PC gaming, especially for online distributed games. The central change that impacts all downloadable applications in Vista is the introduction of Limited User Accounts... In Vista, LUA's are mandatory and inescapable... The principal user experience problem with LUA's is that when a consumer wants to download and install a game demo off the Internet, they must first click past the IE warning dialogs, and then respond to the security elevation dialog Vista pops up requiring an admin account name and password to enable the software installation." - Alex St. John

Additional problems include a built-in ratings system using ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board) standards that treats "unrated" games as dangerous and may block them with parental controls. Since most indie or casual games can't afford to have their product rated by the ESRB, this places them into a software ghetto within the new operating system.

Microsoft thinks that small developers are overreacting, and that the impact on the industry will be minimal. Chris Donahu, the Group Manager for Games for Windows, points out that the goal of Vista's game integration is to make the game experience more seamless and user-friendly, like the kind of experience people get on consoles. He defends the OS in this Hollywood Reporter story reprinted in GameDaily.

Here at GameSpy, we're in the midst of verifying Vista compatibility with all of our software. It's a hard row to hoe -- you want to make your software as easy to use as possible, but requiring an administrator password with every install is a nightmare. On the flipside, I've applauded Microsoft for supporting indie gaming with Microsoft XNA. While it's not the first time that branches of the company appear to be at cross-purposes, hopefully the Microsoft gaming group as a whole can come to some sort of consensus that will help small game developers to get their products out there to people. Thoughts? Mail me!

-Fargo

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