Win XP feedback as requested by Higby

Uh, users normally cannot install software on a business machine. They are part of a domain, their users do not have administrative access - installing software is not infrequently against company policy. Its not exactly uncommon that these machines cannot even download patches for themselves, those must be administered by a WSUS server.
In addition, these machines almost never have a discrete GPU (complete waste of money in these machines), normally possessing solely an integrated GPU.

Why not support them? Because doing so costs, and the resulting income would be far smaller than what you could get by expending the same cost against the "mainstream" system base.

As has been much of the point in the discussion, had they concentrated on DX11 support (thus dumping XP) - then any system with a DX10 or DX11 capable hardware would run the game more efficiently. Whether those be low end systems, or high end systems. WoW didn't implement its D3D11 renderer for strictly graphical reasons, Blizzard did it to make low end hardware run better, and that work still made high end hardware run better too. It also removed certain restrictions on settings (D3D9 cannot mix types of effects).

You keep talking about business machines. But we are talking about home computers not business machines. Totally different beasts. Home pc's do have better gpu's be they built in or discrete. The minimal specs are far above business specs and above quite a few home pc configurations. Its not like they are supporting intels old integrated graphics. And using WOW as an example is not a good one to support what you are saying as they have lost many customers and continue to do so at an alarming rate. While they still have a lot of subscribers more then most pc online games. They have lost almost over half their total subscription numbers.

When you raise minimal specs you lose those customers that can not meet them. And few people will spend a couple hundred dollars to upgrade their pc to play a free to play game. Especially with so many other free to play games that exist out there now and that are released every few months.

No that is not what killed the pc market and what continues to damage it. Think more on the lines that almost all pc games now are online and the majority of those are free to play. As a shop owner are you going to try to keep all pc games in stock? Digital downloads have hit pc gamers harder then they think. Its hard to pick up new pc gamers when all your games are digital downloads and promoting these games is difficult because of that.

Add to that that you can not hardly buy any if at all used pc games. And almost all of them are online only. These are what is combining killing the pc game market. Now factor in the higher costs to build a gaming pc. Then factor in that the gamingt pc needs upgraded every 2 years (graphics cards ram operating systems and power supplies and in some cases cpu upgrades). Now compare that to a console you purchase 1 time and lasts 5-6 years of gaming. And you can purchase those games used making game purchasing cheaper.

Then factor in that pc gaming companies listen to people like those here saying that supporting the number 2 of the most common operating systems. Thus limiting their marketing to more potential customers and its no wonder pc gaming has been on a sharp decline. Then factor in that many companies are concentrating on mobile devices such as smart phones laptops and tablets. Desktop gaming is not doing to well in recent years. Want proof go look at the pc title releases and release dates. Then ask why there are so few of them? The goal should be to keep and attract as many new players as possible. Not trying to act like some elitist because you can afford better components in your pc then some one else.

Because as I have said before, a very significant amount of XP machines are business machines. In the consumer space, XP is not very prevalent.

PC game revenue has increased YOY for ages, that is the opposite of "dying" - heck the XB360 and PS3 combined produce less money than PC games for dev houses.
You are confusing the well being of brick and mortar stores with the well being of the PC gaming industry.

Piracy rates have dropped significantly over the last few years, a trend that has followed also in the movie and music industry as digital shops have become available. Lots of people do not care about owning media products physically, which is why we have seen the rise of Netflix, iTunes, Steam, and similar services. Torrent traffic isn't the largest source of internet traffic anymore - Youtube and Netflix both beat torrent traffic. Blueray is widely considered a bust - and its well accepted that the PS3 did not enjoy any real growth from its Blueray playback capability due to the format's complete inability to take off. PC OEMs have never really bothered putting Blueray players in their machines, generally being relegated to BTO. And these days, laptops are rapidly shedding their optical drive all together - and tablets quite obviously never had one.

PCs have not required bi-annual upgrades for ages. An Intel i7 920, released in 2008, will still run nearly everything you throw at it. Even older CPUs, such as the stronger Core 2 processors will still handle majority of titles.

GPUs require a little more upgrades, but those are neither expensive nor difficult to upgrade. Even then, due to the stagnation of PC monitor resolution, and due to cross platform development being highly popular, the requirements here also haven't increased much at all. These days, GPU benchmarks are often more focused on 2560x1440 or 4k resolutions now because 1080p produces boring and often irrelevant results.

Some titles such as BF can push this a bit harder, but the majority does not. You can play most of the COD games on a toaster.

Ok explain then how xp had the os market by a large share up until about a year and a half ago? It wasn't until January or February of last year that windows 7 took xp as the most common OS. So those machines just stopped existing? There were many pc's sold prior to windows 7 release. And few people jumped on the vista OS. And those games made prior to windows 7 were gaming machines. And they utilized windows xp and some still use it. Some have jumped ship when they upgraded their systems and went with windows 7 64.

But not all of them did. As for pc gaming? The free to play games and mmo's are being counted in the numbers you are looking up. Now with the xbox 1 and ps4 set to support many of these games how much further will we see the pc gaming desktop slide? Even in digital content pc titles do not come as numerous as those for consoles. And many companies are jumping ship to making titles for consoles. And have been for years. Most new games pc's see now are primarily just console games ported to pc. There are very very few pc only titles.

You know why cpu's are not required to be upgraded often? that is really easy. its because it more then likely also requires a new mother board especially with intel as they do not support their sockets for very long. And its suggested to upgrade your gpu every 2 years at the longest to keep optimal setting in games. Those older pc's still game well as developers do not generally listen to players asking that support for their other player base be stopped. Such as what many in this topic have been asking for with windows xp.

And since many pc titles are just now fully utilizing dual core cpu's its no wonder why even the older dual cores game well. My athlon x2 4400+ was still gaming well up until it died after 6 years of use. And it like this pc have both sported windows xp. And they are not and were never business machines. You are just making a wild accusation that is unfounded in any hard data that those sporting windows xp right now are all business pc's. And your final sentence lets me know my time is wasted explaining any of this to you as you seem to think any old pc can play any games and windows xp is completely dead already. All of which is untrue and has no hard data to back it up. So i will not further waste my time.

You're losing credibility in your arguments when you try to apply data sets not biased toward gamers. XP was OEM for years and existed in work environments. A lot of the statistics when looking at all computer users will reflect that. I remember seeing my dad's laptop when visiting him. A company of over 60K employees exclusively using XP for security reasons. They did a mass upgrade like a year ago and he got a new Windows 7 machine. Those corporate shifts are what you're looking at. That and universities. I worked for my university while attending and upgraded multiple labs (probably over 1,500 computers) from XP to 7. That said those general statistics include people that would never play a game on those PCs and thus the data is meaningless for this discussion. Stick to steam's statistics. That puts it at less than 7.145% of players that could be using XP. Even lower if you dig into how many people in the 7 million people surveyed have the gpu and cpu capability to even start the game.

you care about laptop and dual core users??

i think im going to cry in happiness that i have found a dev that cares about me and my laptop

thank you


have you guys found a fix for hitching yet? its the main reason i havnt been able to play all that much in the last week or so