All may not be well in Vista land. According to GameDaily and GigaGames (via /.), the operating system may spell death to indie games. From the article:
What is at issue is the new Game Explorer, a one-stop application within Vista designed to make game installation and accessing information about installed games far simpler than previous versions of the operating system. It also makes note of the local rating of those games that have received ratings, and it allows parents to enforce them or not. ... But many casual games, which are typically created by smaller developers with skimpy budgets, are not rated for many reasons, including the fact that the ESRB [and the BBFC in the UK, and PEGI pan-Europe] charges a fee to rate games. Some developers fear that they will now be forced to go through the ratings process or risk having their games "vanish" from desktops if parents set Game Explorers to ignore unrated titles.
It seems the days of bedroom coders are well and truly over, if they want to develop for Microsoft platforms, that is.
