Valve Says Choice to Make DX10 Vista-Only Hurt PC Gaming

Erris writes "Valve's President Gabe Newell is calling Microsoft's choice to make DirectX 10 Vista-only a 'terrible mistake' that has harmed gaming. His company's latest hardware study shows the strategy has not moved gamers onto Vista. The result is that almost no one is using the newest version of DirectX, and companies are shying away from creating new input devices that support it. Nine months after release, after Christmas, after graduation, and with school mostly back in session, still only 8% of gamers are using it." Update: 08/27 21:09 GMT by Z : An AC points out that these numbers may be framed poorly given uptake numbers for XP's release.

Comments

Gaming the system for fun and profit

[Anonymous Coward]

This exact same journal entry was penned by twitter, who had it rejected from the Firehose probably because of his negative moderation and the fact that editors are starting to wise up to him.

The original journal entry already had comments that poke holes in twitter's claim about those numbers, which is probably why it became inconvenient and forced him to switch to his sockpuppet account instead.

Ironically, the same story in Heise.de has a link to another one about a gaming convention in Leipzig drawing all-time record attendance. I suppose it's possible that DX10/Vista will hurt the gaming industry, but with the game release cycle being 12-16 months, I'd say that will be apparent later on.

Here is a direct link to the original Valve survey, which amusingly enough shows Vista as having an even larger market share among Valve gamers as it has overall (8% vs 5-6%). That means Vista's market share among gamers has been increasing at a rate of about 1% per month since it was released, which is even higher than XP's uptake vs. Windows 98/ME. I can't even begin to imagine what the relevance of Christmas and back to school as claimed by twitter is for gamers who probably switch OSes only when they switch their $3,000 boxes anyway, but I'd say that 8% share is actually not bad in that segment. That share will probably start growing more exponentially as time goes by.

Welcome to the Trolled By Twitter Club, Zonk.

Re:Gaming the system for fun and profit

[pantherace]

However, even while Vista has about 8%, Vista + DX 10 is 2.3% of users. That's about half as many as are using DX 7. About 15% use DX 8, and the rest are DX9 types.

In terms of being able to sell one's product to the most people, it then makes more sense to make sure DX 7 runs it well, than it does for DX10. Unless you want to jack the price up, to compensate. Let's see, to make a new game for just DirectX 10, that would be about... 2000$ for the same revenue stream, based on steam's percentage.

The other thing people forget, is how Microsoft's tools are no longer targetted at the PC, instead they are targeted at the Xbox. This has had rather (IMO) disastrous consequences for one game I play, Supreme Commander. GPG was being partly funded by Microsoft (or would have been, my memory is foggy), and it was intended to be the first DX10 game and use Microsoft's networking, etc.

This is great and all, but the way Microsoft and GPG used it, it has to be peer to peer. And each computer runs the sim. Which would be fine, if it weren't one of the most taxing games on a cpu currently existing. This would be fine in a homogeneous environment, such as the Xbox. However, PCs aren't. So if one person has a crappy computer, it will slow EVERYONE down.

Microsoft stands to make more money from Xbox, so they are either intentionally, or unintentionally, doing things which are killing the PC games market.

Re:XP unable to support dx10 or what?

[n dot l]

My understanding is that it requires significant changes to the driver model and that they couldn't back-port the changes to XP. Then again the DX10 equivalent OpenGL extensions all work (or will work) on XP (or so I've been promised by NV's reps at GDC) so that's probably only part of the issue (the other part being the Vista push).