Indie Vista gaming d0med?
.
Well this just delayed my purchase of Vista until “when I’m forced”. Admitedly there will probably be some game I want to get this year that will make me get Vista but hopefully not.
A lot of what he says here doesn’t jive with what I’ve been reading.
Well, he’s talking about the casual game market being impacted by an extra click or password here or there. It doesn’t seem to kill the Mac market, so I’m not sure what the issue is.
Well as a user of Vista for over a month now, I have to say I completely disagree with is complaints about LUA and the security escalation dialog.
First of all the article seems to imply that you have to enter a password every time the dialog appears. While I imagine it is possible to set up user accounts that way, that’s not how it works by default. Instead you just click a button in a dialog to elevate, no text entry required.
Secondly, I actually am thankful whenever I see that dialog when browsing/downloading stuff from the web. I sure as hell want to know when an executable downloaded from the web is about to be run. I guess it is slightly annoying when you get a prompt from both IE and the OS, but to me at least its a far cry from the monstrosity he makes it out to be…
No idea about the game explorer issues he mentions though; I’ve never even looked at that…
Blah… basically automatically installing stuff from the web without users knowing about it is going to be harder. I rather have security than a new version of Elf Bowling.
And you call yourself a gamer!
Is there no place in Vista where a game could install itself without requiring privilege escalation? ‘Program Files’ might need to remain protected (or perhaps given the ‘sticky bit’ behaviour), but maybe there should be a standard ‘My Programs’ location for user-installed programs.
It works on Macs since either the user is a non-admin user and can still drag-and-drop apps to somewhere within their home directory, or they’re an ‘admin user’, which has the right to write to places like /Applications.
(I’m referring mostly to these ‘casual’ games and not the more complicated ones that need a full installer, want to scribble stuff all over the place, etc. Edit: And yeah, it’s hardly end-of-the-world stuff, but even annoyances are worth at least investigating.)
a fucker with a rubber is still a fucker.
FWIW, that guy has a monthly column in CPU and he is pretty much anti-MS on everything.
Well there’s two seperate issues - running an executable from the web is flagged because people are stupid.
Running an executable which then tries to install DLLS, or registry entries or what have you is another, or probably several other issues.
Alright, so I’m trying to determine some FACTS here:
FACT:
-
I am going to have to enter a password to install shit because of stupid people.
-
Apparently, I don’t want to have to enter a password to install game demos, according to this guy.
Am I missing any facts here?
Don’t think so. And I don’t think you’ll have to enter a pw to install a game demo, it’s just the downloading it and then running it part that the security doesn’t like. Stupid people, ya know. But if it does what it seems like every windows app wants to do and messes with the registry, you’ll get another popup for that.
Which is probably an issue for WildTangent, since its “Web Driver” wants to run all the time. It’s even flagged as malware from time-to-time by the various AdAware-type programs.
Ya, well fuck WT. The only thing they’ve ever done that didn’t suck is Fate, and that guy left.
He said that users expect their games to be visible in Games Explorer. I’m not sure that they will, though, or that it’s at all a big deal if they are filed as normal programs.
That was another false note - according to one of our Microserfs here, that’s fairly easily doable. The problem he was really bitching about was that you needed an ESRB rating to get out of the “Not Rated” category, which is a problem for parental controls.
Personally I don’t see it as being that big of a problem. You’re going to miss those 10 kids that wanted to play your casual game but mom locked down the computer as hard as possible AND they weren’t smart enough to google up the workaround.
Not many of those kids have credit cards.
Yeah, it’s not an issue today; people seem to be able to find games when they create icons on the desktop. And Vista will still let them do that.
Well here he means “indie” games to be the 10$ puzzle game market. Any barrier in his mind between getting his game on your computer and his company is a bad one. I don’t really, honestly though, feel his argument is valid unless his userbase is expected to be a kind of herbivorus cow-eyed consumer that licks up whatever is front of them but is startled and stampedes away from anything that causes them to think, like a popup warning.
A good man!