Steam Survey Takes PC Gaming's Pulse 172
Via Rock Paper Shotgun and Primotech, the latest in Valve's ongoing PC hardware survey via the Steam service. Some very interesting stuff in there, though probably nothing too surprising. From RPS's analysis: "Vista has shown a small increase in representation, but clearly nowhere near where Microsoft would have desperately hoped. Previously 7.99% of gamers were using the latest operating system. Now it's 16.91%, with a vast 81.13% sticking with XP. Rather confirming Valve's position on DX10, and what a massive waste of time it is developing for Vista only."
MS should reconsider DX10 for XP (Score:5, Insightful)
They should allow XP users to download and use DX10 as they have all along for other revisions of DirectX.
Re:MS should reconsider DX10 for XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, it still wouldn't get me to buy it, but that would remove at least one barrier.
Re:MS should reconsider DX10 for XP (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Waste of time? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:poor survery data.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet you if there was an officially supported version of steam that ran on Linux (via wine or whatever) it would have a higher percentage of use then Vista has as most Linux users are computer enthusiasts and gamers. Although Macs probably have a bigger user base not many are gamers.
Re:MS should reconsider DX10 for XP (Score:3, Insightful)
Take a vacuum cleaner; a newer model has a more powerful motor that would work perfectly in the older model. In addition, there are more attachments (or whatever) that actually do only work with the newer model. The older model is still in use, and they could sell the motor to people that had it, so does that mean the other new features on the new vacuum aren't worthwhile? Of course not.
Re:MS should reconsider DX10 for XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Both of those concepts have to be realized together. They've always backported DirectX to their supported systems AND they lied that it was technical reasons they couldn't do it this time. Why are they lying? If they had just come right out and said "DirectX 10 is only on Vista so that we can add another reason to the already long list of worthy upgrades" then I would understand that, but that's not what they did. They came out and gave us the lie "We aren't going to backport DX10 like we've done with all other versions because it's technically not possible." That says to me that they don't have a long list of reasons to upgrade, they have DX10.
That said, even if they did backport it and admit they lied, I still wouldn't buy Vista.
Re:Vacuum (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm well aware of the existance of linux and mac gamers. I personally use a Mac. And your post simply reinforces my opinion that WINE is a bad thing. Why should software manufacturers make platform agnostic code when users are willing to run under Cedega/WINE?
Re:Dos (Score:4, Insightful)
Eventually MS moved DX into the kernel, and suddenly games ran fine under DX and everyone switched. DX quickly overcame OpenGL in popularity. This was the age of DX.
Now history repeats, and DX10 is back out of the kernel (user-mode driver architecture) and it's slow and game studios are ignoring it. What were the odds?
Re:Marginalised audio (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Waste of time? (Score:3, Insightful)