The most frustrating marketing decision any company can make is forcing consumers to upgrade unnecessarily. Microsoft chose this path with Vista. In order to maintain Xbox and Vista sales, commonly referred to as hedging a bet, Microsoft decided that several of their games would only be compatible with Vista. Halo 2, for example, was released for the Xbox (not 360) on November 9, 2004. This was almost 3 years ago. I would suspect that anyone who prided themselves as a gamer would have already borrowed or bought an Xbox to play this game. Why would this be an incentive to upgrade to Vista?
My second point has to do with the next generation of DirectX. According to Microsoft this cutting edge API can only be supported by Vista. There are several companies already cracking and reverse engineering DirectX 10 for support on XP as well as Linux. Honestly do you think if it wasn’t possible that these companies would bother setting up shop to tackle this problem? Do they really know something about DirectX that Microsoft, the creators, don’t know. Highly unlikely. Microsoft is painting themselves into the greedy bastards corner, even more then usual.
The final straw for me was an article on Slashdot pointing to this survey from Valve. According to system statistics of the 1,092,762 systems in the survey only 2.31% were DirectX10 Systems (Vista with DirectX10 GPU). After nine months of public consumption only 2.31% of the usually bleeding edge gamer market were even bothering to upgrade to Vista to run DirectX 10. Even more telling were that 7.99% of the users were running Vista. Even gamers running Vista weren’t upgrading to DirectX 10 in the droves that Microsoft would hope for. Pathetic. Moronic even. There were more than twice that many users running DirectX 7 than DirectX 10 (4.97%).
You can draw your own conclusions from this survey, I believe this is a direct indication that people are skeptical of Vista, and DirectX 10 for gaming. Everything I have ever read, and experienced in gaming is that frame rate is king. If you bog the system down with background processes your game will run like crap. Vista requires so much additional hardware that I made the decision to not upgrade. Why would I cripple
my kick ass gaming rig by installing a system that requires twice as much RAM, Double the graphics power, and more CPU speed? If my current system plays 99.99% of the games on the market, why would I want to upgrade at a significant cost to play the other .01%? Especially when that game is three years old! I’m not in any hurry to burn my cash on upgrading my system. Heck I could buy an Xbox, with keyboard, mouse, and Halo 2 for less than the cost of the video card upgrade. Or I could borrow an Xbox from a buddy for a week and pay Microsoft a dime…Hmmm, that sounds even better.