Is Vista Going To Destroy Indie Gaming?
Alex St. John, one-time game evangelist for Microsoft and program director for DirectX, has written a scathing commentary on the new Windows Vista and how it may cripple independent games.

As a now indie game publisher himself, he's in a particularly interesting position. As he states,

"It’s perhaps ironic that I run my own online game publishing company now and have become a dependent customer of the platform and technologies I once worked to create. Some of you might call it `justice' -- if it is, I wish it for my successors working on Vista."

The problems he outlines with getting games to run in Vista include:

* Mandatory and inescapable "Limited User Accounts" (LUAs) make installing a piece of software from the Internet require jumping through many hoops, and clicking through several security warnings. This is likely to scare off (or at least annoy) many users who would otherwise become customers.

* The ontrusive security measures extend to the new, tightly integrated "Game Explorer," which users will come to expect (by design) to find their games. If your game doesn't register itself with the Game Explorer, it will be a second-class citizen, and may confuse users who won't be able to find it where it is "supposed" to be.

* If your indie game DOES register with the Game Explorer, your indie game may be in an even worse state. Without an ESRB rating, the game registering "properly" as a game will be blocked by the parental controls. To top it off, Vista will actually offer to DELETE the link to the game if you try to run it from anywhere on the system other than within the Game Explorer.

While they complained and submitted bug reports over the last two years about how these "features" would affect small game developers and publishers, Microsoft continued forward without changing stride. Alex St. John speculates that there may have been an ulterior motive, and Microsoft was preemptively making a move to crush the competition:

"Since the Game Explorer is also inexplicably hard coded into Vista and `secured' from any modification, nobody can presumably fix its problems or otherwise augment it other than Microsoft. Considering the effort Microsoft must have invested in making the Game Explorer this onerous and immutable, it seems plausible that it was intended as a place holder for a subsequent game service offering from Microsoft."

I guess we'll soon find out how badly this is going to torpedo indie game efforts. It definitely sounds like it's going to make our job that much harder, as we already have a difficult job of trying to educate users on how to navigate the fairly ugly process of downloading, installing, and running downloadable games. Microsoft has just made things easier for their "approved" partners and even more difficult for those of us not rich enough to be invited to the party, I guess.

Considering how supportive Microsoft has been for indies with the XBox 360, I think this further illustrates how Microsoft is less of a monolithic beast and more of a collection of very different business units.

Be sure and read the entire article HERE.


(Vaguely) related mumblings and grumblings:
* Dependent, Independent, and Indie
* Spector Warns Indies To "Forget It!"
* Wildest Birthday Party Ever!
* Indies Squeezed Out of XBLA?

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Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:45 AM (Permalink)