Game Developer Says Vista Breaks Casual Online Games

[M_Nabil]

Dailytech


Former Microsoft employee criticizes Vista controls

The world is still absorbing all the added features and security of Windows Vista, game developers and casual gamers may have something to be unhappy about when it comes to the Microsoft?s operating system.

According to game developer WildTangent, a developer that makes small online games for casual gamers, Windows Vista breaks compatibility with games on MSN, RealArcade, Yahoo Games and AOL Games.

?Vista's incompatibility with most downloadable casual games, including those on Microsoft's own gaming portal demonstrates the enormous challenges facing many small game developers with getting their games to work with the new OS,? read a WildTangent statement.

In addition to breaking existing games, the security restrictions of the new operating system will rely heavily on ESRB ratings to block children from accessing inappropriate games. Alex St. John, CEO and co-Founder of WildTangent, and once evangelist for Microsoft?s DirectX API, believes that this represents an additional hurdle for the smaller games developers since most of these games are family appropriate but lack expensive ESRB ratings.

?Parents who choose to use Vista's parental controls are likely to accidentally block access to hundreds of very popular family friendly games that happen not to have ESRB ratings," said St. John.

St. John was eager to boast that WildTangent's new Vista-ready console includes a parental control solution that ensures parental control over downloaded content without blocking access to family appropriate content that happens to lack an ESRB rating.

?WildTangent has spent the last year preparing for Vista. We worked with nearly every major casual game developer to get their games tested and compatible with Vista in our network in anticipation of these problems,? he said.

[LiNuX]

lol Bill Gates was on the Daily Show on monday night promoting the new Vista lol.

About the parental controls -- Jon Stewart said that if his parents block his sites -- it means no more porn for him lol

[Magnetism]

You would have thought that microsoft would have tested its own gaming facilities that they have built into their other products like msn. I think that alot of the bugs are just people incorrectly using it at the miniute though as alot of them that I have heard about from people using it have just ironed themselves out over time as the user became more comfortable with the interface.

[Eric]

Just wait, a patch will eventually come out because of all the hatemail Microsoft will get from this

[Magnetism]

I thought there would have already been a service pack for it like there was for XP but non as yet which makes me think that these arent actually bugs but more configuration options set up by the user wrongly.