Anyone aware of the ratings issues with Vista?

#1 I've seen a few ways around it such as having your game installed as a normal application rather than having it display under the "Games" menu where you have to have the ratings and such. Hopefully that makes sense :\

#2 Interesting if that works. I haven't been dealing with the installer app so I'll check into that. I haven't been following Vista so I was shocked to hear it has an encoded ratings system. A massive headache and it really hurts the independents. I tend to think it was just incredibly shortsighted and not malicous. We are talking Microsoft here. It's likely to get changed but there will be a lot of machines out there set up that way. For retail boxed games they need to be submitted anyway but it hurts smaller and freebie games. We were planning to post some freebie levels to promote a company website but I don't want to deal with a few thousand tech support letters wondering why the games won't run on Vista. If the installer can be configured to avoid the issue that would be the best solution. The joke is the current system doesn't filter out so much violent content as unrated content.

#3 Installing and running most likely is not the problem (ok, with TGB it could, make sure you install it to the users application folder, not C or D or somewhere like that. Because TGB does not like to be split and the "save to" path must be in the users folder. That has been like this on XP for years, its just that nobody is logged in as user on those machines)

#4 My impression was that you are fine so long as you don't care about not being listed in the Vista 'Games' section, which is how all the older games are going to be listed anyway.

There isn't anything forcing developers to have a game work with the Vista 'Games' which is a key fact developers need to keep in mind when reading this stuff and is unfortunately never mentioned in any of these articles.

So if you are fine with having your game just listed with all the regular programs on Vista then you have nothing to worry about. But if you want your game listed in the Vista 'Games' section you'll have to jump through the hoops.

#5 I haven't tried Vista yet and there may be some FUD going around. I found posts that said unrated games wouldn't run if parental controls were set and they are set by default. Obviously they can be turned off but that would require both realizing that was the problem and being willing and able to do it. Most people find turning on a computer tramatic enough and don't like configuring things. I'm hoping that it was just bogus information. Guess I need to set up a Vista machine for testing purposes anyway. Really hoped to avoid that for a few weeks/months/years. Still not a big fan of XP and I try to work mostly on my Win 2000 machines eventhough they are older and slower. Vista sounds like a real headache. I just hate being constantly prompted. My Mac machine is the best and largely leaves me alone but with the XP it's a constant fight. Win 2000 was kind of middle of the road.

Thanks. Looks like it may be a non issue but I figured I better ask.

#6 Chip is correct. Your game should not affected by parental control lockout as long as you do not attempt to integrate with the Vista Games Explorer. Registering with Games Explorer must be done explicitly in your installer, usually by making calls to gameuxinstallhelper.dll included in the directX samples, so you won't do it by accident. For our last game we were prepared (minus esrb rating) with GDFs, extra high res icons, and Games Explorer support in our installer, yet every distributor we've worked with has said they did not want any of that. So it's really up to your distributors whether you'll be able to integrate with games explorer and need a rating.

#7 Our distributors were definately my biggest concern. I come out of film and we usually have a very defined structure the distributors want. We haven't gotten to that stage with our distributors so I didn't want any surprises. I was mostly afraid of tech support calls due to games not running. We'll have to sumit the game since it's headed for store shelves but that might not happen until after a gold master is made and I don't want to have to redo the master because of ratings.

Thanks everyone. Definately feeling better about it. Finishing our first game is roughly coinciding with the release of Vista so I wanted to make sure there were no known issues. I still don't know anyone personally using it. Most of my circle are waiting for the dust to settle.