[casual_games] A Response from Microsoft

[Alex St. John]

First, let me say that it's absolutely great that somebody from MS is reading this forum and responding.  Please don't feel that anything I have to say here is leveled at anybody at MS personally, however we've struggled with Vista issues a long time, and the information in your response doesn't contain the whole story.  We know nobody in the MS OS group is really in the casual game business or was in a position to understand the "unintended" consequences of some choices that were made, but it appears that we have to live with the consequences of some of that naivety now.   
   
  It's true that parental controls are "optional" and are "buried" but once used are also "broken" and if even a small % of consumers adopt them create a sweeping support issue for small developers who can't afford MS sized call centers to deal with them.  Had MS not jammed a highly prominent Games Explorer menu in the top level start button, it might not be an issue, but now that it's there with prominent promotion of its parental control feature, we have every reason to expect that it will be widely used, and expected to index all games by consumers.  Ergo, there is no "choice" for game developers, they're forced to support the thing.  
   
  Our developers attempted to support Vista parental controls, but Microsoft provides no API's for a game or game manager to provide their own UI access to parental controls or provide alternative UI to the game explorer, so a game cannot "adopt" the system and interpret parental controls intelligently.  Thus parental controls are imposed unilaterally by Vista, even on good citizen games that have played by the rules and gotten ESRB ratings.  This is not an issue between game developers and the ESRB, it was never a problem for casual games until Microsoft arbitrarily mandated them instead of providing a solution developers could choose to adopt.  The BEST thing Microsoft could do to make Vista a better gaming environment would be to simply delete the Game Explorer before shipping Vista, thereby making the parental control issue irrelevant.
   
  As for LUA problems in Vista, why would Microsoft imply that the developers are at fault for not adopting a security mode of the Windows OS that was so widely reviled by consumers that nobody adopted it in XP?   Furthermore there is simply no way to fix many problems created by LUA for casual games which is one of the major reasons consumers never used that mode.  Consumers (especially kids) consume casual games like music lovers consume songs.  There is no simple way in Vista to make frequent downloading and installation of many games from the web, often by kids, friendly or easy.  It's just busted by security warning after security warning and security elevation dialogs.  If a kid wants to download and try 5 casual games, they'll drive their par tents crazy asking them to type in elevation passwords.  
   
  The net impact on the downloadable game business will be chilling and there is very little anybody can do to fix it except Microsoft.  
   

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