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).

OpenGL

[kidcharles]

This is what happens when you only write games for a proprietary API (and for that matter only a single OS). Newell and other game developers cannot truly be shocked about this problem; anyone with half a brain could have told you something like this was bound to happen when you are so wedded to Microsoft. If games were still developed with OpenGL, this would not be an issue. If games were written for multiple OS's, this would not be an issue.

Win-Win for Microsoft.

[guidryp]

People are forced to go to Vista if they want DX10. Win.
PC gaming is further messed up and more people go to console (Xbox). Win.

The downside for Microsoft is what? People pissed with Microsoft tactics? Yeah that would be new...

Re:Huh?

[amuro98]

Yes, yes, yes. Microsoft making DX10 a "Vista only" feature was clearly an effort to get folks to upgrade to Vista sooner rather than later. No one was ever fooled by Microsoft's claims about how DX10 could only be implemented with Vista's "advanced" architecture...

Unfortunately, it hasn't been working out too well for Microsoft. Between the horrible driver support, expensive hardware requirements, and the general incompatibility issues you expect whenever upgrading to a major new OS, Vista has been mostly a bust for gamers (and even general users.) Furthermore, this doesn't even include the normal warnings about buying version 1.0 of ANYTHING for your PC - much less anything from Microsoft that hasn't had at least 2 SPs released for it, much less waiting for a major refresh, like Win95b.

Then there's the whole DX10.1 debacle, which promises to make all existing "DX10" video cards obsolete before they've even gotten proper support. Whee! Microsoft sure loves them some gamers!

Most gamers I know are putting off the upgrade to Vista for as long as possible - Microsoft's profits be darned. XP ain't broke, so why "fix" it with Vista which so far has proven to be more a step backwards than anything else?

In my opinion, Microsoft wants to KILL PC gaming - and is using Vista and DX10 to do it. Think about it. How much does Microsoft make off every sale of a non-Microsoft PC game? Exactly $0. All those copies of HalfLife2 - $0. WoW - $0. Civ, BioShock, Sims - $0, $0, and $0. Sure, they make money on the sale of Vista, but that's what, one sale per gamer until Vista's replacement comes out 4-5 years later? Meanwhile, over on Microsoft's XBox side, EVERY copy of EVERY game sold results in a paycheck of $5-10 in licensing fees. This includes not just the games you see in stores, but also the titles you can download off Xbox Live Arcade. There's also the money Microsoft makes from selling Xbox SDKs to the developers - since they have no choice BUT to buy it - unlike on the PC where Microsoft has much less control on what software is used. Furthermore, the console market is exponentially larger than the PC gaming market - and has been for years. Microsoft even makes money from online play on the console with its Xbox Live service - which is yet another area they're making exactly $0 off of PC gamers.

Why OpenGL should have been the de facto standard

[John Hansen]

With a thorn like this in Microsoft's side, there is certainly a part of me that hopes that we will begin to see more OpenGL games released versus DirectX.

Don't get me wrong, DirectX is a nice graphics library, but the seriousness of the vendor lock-in is just staggering -- and scenarios like this are a perfect example of a game development company's worst fears.

This situation was created because not enough effort was put into OpenGL when it needed it the most to make it a truly cutting-edge standard. The blame for that particularly lies with Microsoft and their aggressive campaign for Direct3D (and DirectX). As a result, OpenGL languished for several years, with only incremental feature updates (to version 1.5, which IIRC wasn't even a real release, but more of a vendor patchset for 1.4). In the meantime, DirectX leapfrogged its way to version 9 with a ridiculous amount of features being added.

OpenGL 2.1 finally came out last August (http://www.opengl.org/documentation/current_versi on/) to very little fanfare. About the only companies it really mattered to were the Xbox competitors, namely, Sony and Nintendo. The PC gaming industry as a whole didn't care, because they had a solution that was "good enough" -- DirectX 9.

Now, OpenGL 3.0 is "on track" to be finalized at the end of this month. Whether that will happen is anyone's guess, but it looks like the DX10 situation has finally lit a fire under their collective asses. Who knows, we may even see an OpenGL 3.0 specification by September, but I'm not really holding my breath.
http://www.opengl.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?u bb=get_topic;f=3;t=015351;p=0

Of course, even though there's a brand spanking OpenGL almost ready to again kick Direct3D's ass performance wise, Microsoft has already taken steps to ensure that won't happen. OpenGL 1.4 (yes, 1.4!) is implemented in Vista as a translation layer to run Direct3D calls on the hardware. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D_vs._OpenGL#P ortability This cripples OpenGL's performance advantage. Of course, if you want to run the newest OpenGL on the newest hardware, as you should, they've put another roadblock in the way with Vista: you have to use the Windows XP drivers, which disable the nice flashy Aero interface. At this point, you're probably thinking, "Wait, wasn't Aero a selling point of Vista?" Well, that certainly makes sense. Only hardcore gamers would want to trade off their interface for OpenGL's performance, but your average casual gamer doesn't care.

So even if OpenGL 3 is technically superior, publishers probably won't adopt it because of the widespread view that it's slow (thanks to Vista's emulation). iD Software will likely use it as they always have, but it'll become harder to explain to your average user why he needs to install unverified drivers and disable his nice flashy interface just so he can run said game.

It's almost sickening, really, when you think about the damage DirectX has done.