Vista Breaking Online Games, Says Developer

Even with the operating system released to the public, Microsoft cannot seem to catch a break with Windows Vista. The latest complaints come from game developers, who say the OS' parental controls are so strict they're disrupting gameplay.

The charge comes from WildTangent, an online gaming network. It says that security restrictions in Vista actually breaks hundreds of games across RealArcade, Yahoo Games, AOL Games, and even on its own site. The reasons? One is that there's no ESRB rating.

As such, the system misconstrues this as a game inappropriate for children, and blocks it on computers using Parental Controls. Worse yet, founder Alex St. John -- who is also one of the creators of Microsoft's Direct X technology -- seems to suggest the company knew this was coming.

"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," St. John said.

He added that the security features of Vista are also causing several games to break. However, the most discouraging feature for many is the ESRB rating, as the costs to procure one are too expensive for small-time developers.

UPDATE - January 31, 2007, 3:30pm EST In a statement to BetaNews, Microsoft downplayed reports of Vista blocking non ESRB-rated games. "The recent claims made about Windows Vista online game compatibility issues have been grossly overstated and in actuality, a fraction of casual games are encountering temporary upgrade issues – a situation we have largely corrected and are committed to fixing within days," a company spokesperson said.

"For context, of the more than 100 web-based games currently available on MSN Games, only five do not run on Windows Vista as of January 30 and nearly 100% will be fully compatible by week’s end with an update to the Windows Vista installer."

"The online compatibility issue was primarily with the Windows Vista installer, which has been updated. The updated installer has fixed the majority of the issues surrounding casual games’ compatibility with Windows Vista," the spokesperson added. "With regards to unrated games not appearing in Parental Controls, the first thing to note is that Parental Controls is turned off by default. To change this, parents would need to turn on Parental Controls."

Microsoft says the only way Vista could "break" games is if the parents have gone in and made a conscious decision to enable parental controls and have chosen to not allow their kids to play a certain game or games with a certain rating. The company adds that a parent can custom tailor parental controls so they can have the "disallow unrated games" option but still choose to allow certain casual games.