[casual_games] .NET and Silverlight

[Joe Pantuso]

These are definitely two different issues from a user and distribution point
of view.

How well users accept any sort of additional requirements depends primarily
on the user experience around it.  If at all possible you want to make
additional components install on demand and as seamlessly as possible as
part of your single installer.

We've been through a few generations of installer over the last couple
years, and have always installed .NET with a download on demand user
experience, rather than requiring it to be installed by the user.  Same for
DirectX which you can't count on being up to date.  Our installer is
instrumented so that we can measure things like this, since it was a big
concern.  I've been (very) surprised to see only a 5% or so drop off from
installation start to completion of DX install (which is after .NET since DX
will not install managed components unless it detects .NET to already be
present).

I think this is largely due to the majority of consumer PCs already having
.NET on them;  100% of Vista machines have .NET 2.0 and 3.0 on them, and
there are already more Vista machines in use than Macs.  Something over 80%
of all machines sold with XP the last 3 years had .NET on them.  Many
peripheral packages install .NET these days, for example if a user bought an
HP printer or scanner the last 2 years they've already got .NET.

As for Silverlight... this is an interesting animal.  While it is basically
the same for us as developers as .NET, from the consumer point of view it
may as well be an upgrade to Flash, with the penetration curve that
implies.  I believe penetration will be very fast once 1.1 is in release.
This is for two reasons; 1) I have every expectation that MS will do things
to accelerate deployment, up to and including pushing out an IE update that
has it included by default, 2) There is already a lot of interest in
non-game UI using it, for example I've already been asked to advise two
local companies who are planning on adopting it for non-game products, one
of which is a health-care industry application!

Silverlight is a small and quick install and really the sexiest thing to
happen to a browser since the first release of Flash.  I don't think its
full impact has been understood by the community yet.
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