[casual_games] Slow death for the current generation of casual games? (Bugs, Parental Controls & Game Explorer)

[Dave Selle]

Hi Everyone, 

 

Just dropping you a bit of cheer before the holidays...

 

But seriously I want to raise some issues with our game community that
we are seeing currently in our network which will become acute in the
very near future for many developers. 

 

Overall I also am very interested to hear in general what is happening
with Vista preparedness across the industry and what issues you may be
encountering. Here are some of the things that *we* have learned: 

 

==Casual Games Vista Bugs==

 

About 80% of the games we get from third party developers have some kind
of issue with Vista. 

 

Just under half of that number are "severe" issues that will
significantly impact a user's ability to play the game. In our network,
these will have to be pulled once our OEM partners start shipping Vista
on new consumer machines. Outside our network, these will die a slow but
equally inevitable death (if nothing is done to fix them) as consumer
adoption of Vista marches forward. 

 

The issues are mainly in two areas: 

 

*	Installation/save games
*	Sleep/Hibernate resume

 

In terms of Installation, many games write config files or save game
data into the program files area. In Vista this are gets virtualized per
user. Depending on what data is written users can lose save games or in
some cases will not be able to run at all as a non-elevated user after
the initial install. One thing that you can do now in XP to check is to
run in a limited user mode on XP. If your game installs and runs fine in
that mode, 90% it will work in Vista also.

 

The other big one is sleep/resume. Sleep behavior is turned ON by
default in Vista, so everyone with a new PC will be experiencing this.
Furthermore, Notebooks are the fastest growing segment of the PC market
and there it's not just a nice to have feature. Many games do not
recover well, or at all, when coming out of sleep mode. 

 

==Parental Controls & Vista==

 

And finally, even if you fix your bugs there is one other issue looming
which could significantly limit accessibility to your games under Vista:
Parental Controls. 

 

Vista comes with a robust set of Parental controls based on games' ESRB
ratings. And as we all know, relatively few casual games currently are
ESRB rated because few developers have seen the ROI for the cost and
effort of going through the submission process. Vista will certainly
change this equation, especially for new games. 

 

Under Vista, as soon as *any* level of parental controls are set for
games all unrated games will be hidden from the game explorer and
require a lot of extra steps to access them. That's right: your games
can just go "poof" and effectively disappear in Vista. 

 

The best defense against this particular threat is to get out in front
of it and get your games ESRB rated. After the New Year comes and the
Royalty checks start coming in I would strongly encourage all developers
to consider this investment in the future of their games. 

 

Any other big Vista issues that folks are seeing out there? 

 

Here is wishing everyone a happy and successful holiday season! 

 

Best,

 

--Dave 

 

 

WildTangent
David Selle
VP, Content Acquisition & Developer Relations
dselle at wildtangent.com <mailto:dselle at wildtangent.com> 
18578 NE 67th Court
Redmond, WA 98052
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www.wildtangent.com 

 

 

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