You’ve probably seen it before sometimes. You install an application and it’s Installshield installer requires(!!) you to fill in a company name. I just had it again with the demo of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It’s a game for crying out loud! Why the hell do I need to fill in a company name?
It’s a case of laziness. From what I know of the games industry, and this can be wildly inaccurate, the developer sends to files to the production company and they put it in an installer. They just take the default wizard and slap on a custom background or two and they’re done.
So effectively the game developer may have created the perfect game, but because of the lazy production company (the EAs of this world) the Out Of The Box experience you get starts off pretty bad. I’m sure many people have called the support desk to ask why the “next” button is grayed out. And then the support desk needs to explain that you need to fill in the “Company name” box, even though you are just a normal user who bought the game for fun and not for corperate use.
Update
To make things even worse. After filling in a dot (”.”) as a company name and pressing”next”. I’m at the “Select install destination” page. I always install games and applications on my D: drive, so I click “browse” and select a directory on the D: drive. I click okay and the page tells me that the game requires “0k” of space on the destination drive. Weird….so I click “Next”. And I’m presented with the same page, only this time with the space requirement filled in.
I hate lazy programmers.
[Now playing: Spineshank - Slavery]