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jasonf
18-01-2007, 05:03 PM
With all the press games are getting these days and with the rumour that games won't play on a vista machine unless it has been certified by the censors to make sure it's safe for the intended audience, where does that leave the independant developer? Are we sitting on a time bomb waiting to go off if we sell games which are not rated? Accreditation is expensive, something far out of the reach of the bedroom coder. So does this mean that only large companies are allowed to publish their games?

The way things are going, I can imagine this conversation happening in the near future..

Me: "I've written a game, it's really cool.. can I sell it?"
ELSPA: "Not unless it's got a little badge of accreditation"
Me: "Why do I have to get my innocent little game accreddited?"
ELSPA: "Oh, it's for the sake of the kiddies"
Me: "Is it free?"
ELSPA: "Nope"
Me: "So I've got to pay for accreditation?"
ELSPA: "Yup - CherChing ;)"
Me: "What if I don't pay?"
ELSPA: "Your game won't run on Vista and you're breaking the law"
Me: "What if I cheat?"
ELSPA: "Can you pick up the soap?"

Also, different countries have different laws. How do they apply to indy games?

This isn't meant to be a rant BTW, just a tongue in cheek way of opening a discussion. ;)



(on a side note, a random thought has just occurred... Some kids a while back in the states started taking pot shots at cars on the freeway with their dad's assault rifle, then blamed it on violent computer games when they got caught.. forget the fact that their Dad had an assault rifle FFS!!, it's obviously the game's fault!!... with this in mind, is any game safe from this mentality? Do some people seriously have such a problem distinguishing between a game and reality?

Tetris killed my puppy.. Well I was dropping breeze blocks off the shed roof and splat... Tetris made me do it! )

FNX
18-01-2007, 06:28 PM
Nice question jasonf, i'm worried too..
BUT, actually if this is going to be our future i'll, and will force all of my
friends, not to buy/upgrade to Vista.

I've 2 systems on which run XP sp2 without those stupid restrictions (i
know if a program to run or not is a virus!!!) and Win 2000. I won't
upgrade at all. Also i've disabled automatic updates, switched my browser
to Opera, that i found amazing and so on...

If we will be forced to switch to Vista, i'm going to be a Mac or Linux user,
or better, i'll wipe the dust off my Amiga and get back to WorkBench 2.0!

Freedom for the Indies! :lol:

czar
18-01-2007, 06:37 PM
You will still be able to sell your games. It will just mean that when you install it it won't mesh nicely with the new M$ games explorer.

You will still be able to put your icon on the desktop and access the program from teh start menu - i.e. no different than XP.

AthenaOfDelphi
18-01-2007, 06:52 PM
Unfortunately, the majority of users aren't as clued up as we are and so I feel it is undoubtedly going to present a problem to the indy developers.

I've already noticed issues with some of microsofts new security features... I've had two or three people complain that they couldn't connect to our on-line game... why? because the IE7 update which is currently being forced on people won't allow an SSL connection to be established using a certificate that isn't signed by a certificate authority in the users list of Trusted Authorities.

As soon as our root certificate was added to their trusted root authority list, hey presto. It was able to connect.

Now all of this wouldn't be so bad if it actually said 'I'm not connecting because I don't trust the certificate'... Instead it just comes back with 'Cannot connect to server' or some equally useless message which gives the impression that our servers are dead.

So, in short, I kind of agree with your analysis of the situation Jason :?

czar
18-01-2007, 07:58 PM
That is my main beef with Vista. It doesn't bother to tell you anything about what is going wrong.

I couldn't connect to my other home computer - no idea why. i.e., I could connect computer B to A but not from A to B - weird. Where A was the Vista machine and B was an XP computer.

You go online and security popups for Africa. Very annoying.