It appears that comments earlier this week by WildTanget CEO Alex St. John that Windows Vista "breaks" casual games will not go unchallenged.
A notable presence in the online casual gaming market, WildTanget according to St John, spent the better part of a year patching its network in preparation for the combination of Vista's vaunted security capabilities and the propensity for casual games played online to come without ESRB ratings. According to St John:
"Parents who choose to use Vista's parental controls are likely to accidentally block access to hundreds of very popular family friendly games that happen not to have ESRB ratings."Some of those family friendly games include those hosted by the likes of Yahoo, AOL, RealArcade, and yes you guessed it, Microsoft - via MSN Games. There hasn't been much of a response from the first three, but Microsoft has managed to strap on its mouthpiece and in a response posted on TGDaily.com and penned by Rich Wickham, director of Games for Windows, calls the claims "Grossly Overstated." Wickham goes on to say:
"...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."Okay, looks like MSN may be covered. We'll have to see what the other players in the industry have to say. Pogo, AOL, Yahoo, care to step up to the mic? ... Just an afterthough, Joystiq included in its initial post on the subject the caveat that WildTangent is often regarded more or less as spyware by many anti-spyware programs on the consumer market.
Me thinks that Mr. St. John protests too much.
~ Hobson's Choice, Amazon Video Games
