[casual_games] A Response from Microsoft

[John Szeder]

When I grow up I want to be as cool as Alex St. John.

 

  _____  

From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Alex St. John
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2006 12:07 AM
To: casual_games at igda.org
Subject: [casual_games] A Response from Microsoft

 

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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