[casual_games] If Vista is going to be such a problem...

[Alex St. John]

Wow James, I'm utterly floored.  I've never seen anybody get it so backwards in one go.  WildTangent and Real BECAUSE we have downloadable clients benefit tremendously from all the problems with Vista.   While web pages have roughly a 1% conversion probability, clients have 2%-4%.  With Vista's additional "Security measures" for downloadable content,  traditional downloadable game portals are in for a very rough time.  Because Real and WildTangent can apply a single install signature to all packaged games and have a pre-installed download manager we bypass half the Vista warning dialogs that impair downloadble content.  Combined with the fact that we are prinstalled on all Dell, HP, Toshiba and Gateway computers shipping with Vista and populate the new game explorer with over 30 casual games including yours, we'll do exceedingly well under the circumstances.  We've had a full year of engineering and development to devote to overcoming the hurdles many other small developers
 are just beginning to face.  
   
  We can ship popcap games preinstalled on 25 million Vista machines next year BECAUSE popcap is big enough to be able to afford to get ESRB ratings for its games.  We'd like to be able to populate the Windows Game Explorer with more casual games, but because of the problems we have to ask small developers to get their games rated.   (*By the way I'm gratified to hear that the ESRB may have a $400 option, as I mentioned in my earlier post they also have a batch rating program that we use to get bunches of games from mixed developers rated)  
   
  Finally the MS game explorer is no competitive threat to Real or WT because it's also not a game download manager which is the principle feature/value proposition of these products.  It's just frustrating that we can't support Vista parental controls because Microsoft made them so onerous to work with.  We implimented a very consumer friendly version of parental controls in our new Vista client (also ESRB based), but they don't interoperate with the Vista ones which, if enabled, can just break the games that our client is already managing.
   
  So I'm sorry you think that my input to the forum is self serving, but Vista problems are great for us because we're already effective at dealing with them.  I had sincerly intended to inform folks who haven't gotten there yet about the problems we encountered on the way.  I know Microsoft sells a lot of popcap games for you, so I understand your desire to defend them, but enabling Microsoft to stay in denial about the problems they've created isn't doing them any favors.  We need them to listen and take feedback, not remain in denial that they're making mistakes that impact our business. 
   
  This was before your time at Popcap, but do you see this dip in popcap traffic on Aug. 2004?  That dips name is Windows XP/SP2.  It screwed up all ActiveX enabled games, java games, and download managers across the Internet and cast a pall on downloadable game sales that the Internet may never have recovered from.  The huge surge in apparent traffic on your site was all your downloading customers, giving up and playing the free flash games on your site because XP/SP2 scared them away from downloading.  (Take a look at the Alexa graph for that exact date for other game portals as well, the impact is clear)  Microsoft's careless little changes have a real financial impact on all of us and they need to be aware of it.
   
  
   
  Jame said>
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Most of the posts on this subject so far have been negative about the 
new Game Explorer, which surprises me since I expected more independent 
developers to be excited about Game Explorer. Frankly it's the 
entrenched portals with their own third-party solutions (like 
RealNetworks and WildTangent) that I expected to be the most negative. 

That's why I'm not at all surprised that Alex St. John is opposed to the 
Game Explorer -- it threatens his own game channel solution. But for the 
indie developer I think it's overall a net improvement. 


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