Stephen Totilo has once again written a story interesting enough to make me venture within MTV's Stygian halls of autoplay videos and interstitial gum ad hell, and this one talks about Windows Vista's (lack of?) chilling effect on indies, cuing off a Gamasutra opinion piece by WildTangent founder and CEO Alex St. John.

St. John had claimed: "We have found many of the security changes planned for Vista alarming and likely to present sweeping challenges for PC gaming, especially for online distributed games", pinpointing specific issues with the cost of rating games with the ESRB and lockdown issues around parental controls. Totilo cornered Chris Donohue, the director of business development for Games for Windows, who downplayed St. John's concerns:

"I don't think we're artificially restricting anyone, he said. "But on the other side of it there's a yin and a yang to allowing anybody to publish anything on your platform. You're going to get a lot of good stuff and some not-so-good stuff." He also added on the cost of getting a game rated: "A couple of thousand bucks doesn't necessarily work for the casual guys." So what's the end result? Probably that Vista is more of a pain, but Microsoft claims it's a survivable and necessary pain in the interests of locking down PCs from evil content. We'll see, I guess.