Steam Survey Takes PC Gaming's Pulse

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."

Comments

MS should reconsider DX10 for XP

[Dunkz]

If it hasn't become apparent that DX10 is not a reason folks will "upgrade" to Vista by now I don't know what else to say.

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

[Chosen Reject]

This might sound odd, but if DX10 was available on XP, I would be more willing to look into Vista. By keeping DX10 Vista only, they tell me there is nothing in Vista worth upgrading to except DX10, but if it's on XP, then they are saying Vista can stand on its own compared to XP.

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

[Chosen Reject]

The reason they won't backport DX10 is to make it an incentive to buy Vista, of this there is no doubt. However, MS has always backported new versions of DX to their previous releases. The latest nonDX10 version is available for Windows 98 for crying out loud. So now you have a feature that has never been (Windows) OS dependent that suddenly becomes so for "technical reasons," but every day we learn more and more that it was a complete lie. That says to me that it is one of Vista's only selling points. If there really were technical reasons then I could accept that. If it weren't technical reasons and they never said that it was, then I might think differently. Unfortunately, they lied that it was technical reasons when it really wasn't. That says to me that Vista has nothing worth upgrading for except DX10.

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.