I’m really upset that developers will start shifting attention to games for Windows 7 64-bit simply because that’s where the money is, leaving us core WinXP gamers behind.
I’m not at all an early adopter or getting always the latest but:
It’s time to upgrade for you!
When is the XP patch service expiring again? :p
Windows 7 is a platform for frat boys, kids, and shallow gaming webzines.
I seriously doubt it. The only time console games are more visually impressive than PC games is during the first year or two of a console generation, which means that “better graphics” is more often than not something that can be chalked up in the “advantages of a gaming PC” column. That hasn’t been enough to make the PC the dominant gaming platform in the recent-ish past.
Well, that’s the nature of the beast. It’s about time we got everyone around to working with 64-bit applications and games.
I’m still on XP for the moment too, though. I’ll milk this license for as long as I can.
To be fair, XP is going to be eight years old this year, and it will probably be ten years old by the time this really happens. One OS upgrade in a decade doesn’t seem like too much to ask, probably.
Granny just loves her some windows 7 (with the XP shell theme of course): the support for large fonts is fabulous. Relatively. That is, it’s almost as good as OSX but miles beyond previous windows.
All steam users are compulsive upgraders? I think it’s safe to say now that gamers on Steam are a fair representation of PC gamers at large.
And WoW servers still don’t come close to giving the WoW experience, and that was something that took years. At that point, who cares?
The cost of this ‘impressive pc’ has been plummeting though. I would have thought downloadable (cheap!) games and the effect of large memory sizes or SSDs on loading times were also factors now.
This is an idiotic point. 1280x1024 and 1024x768 are still in use by the majority, as are 8800GTs, and XP 32-bit is still winning.
These numbers are changing, but when looking at the numbers for the past two years, this is anything but a population of compulsive upgraders.
Steam users are definitely compulsive, but mostly toward $5 games they will never play rather than hardware upgrades.
Jeez is that right. I had to virtually nail my mouse hand down to avoid picking up Dirt 2 and some Men of War.
Why would you not pick up Dirt 2? It’s a great racing game, especially at $20. I love it as a game I can just play a couple of races for about half an hour and then go play something else.
Because GTA IV, Company of Heroes, Jade Empire, R6 Vegas 2, King Arthur, Tomb Raider Underworld and The Void…
This is not really the case. Steam’s stats are loaded with old systems and old hardware (relatively old, anyway). Not everyone on Steam is a compulsive hardcore PC upgrader type - I would argue that it has reached a mass where the majority aren’t.
The GPU stats tell the tale. Nvidia looks like it has a commanding lead overall. Drill down into the stats, and you see a ton of people bought GeForce 8800 and GeForce 9800 cards (same thing, really) and their cheaper 8600 and 9600 derivatives.
Moving up to the last generation, you have the Radeon 4800 at 12.88% and the GTX 260 at 5.17% - less than half. The Radeon 5000 series has only just barely started to appear on the survey. In this last GPU generation, it looks like adding up the Radeon 4000 series cards is basically double what you get when you add up the GeForce 200 series cards.
But neither one are a majority of the users. In fact, all those last-gen cards combined look like something around 25% of Steam users. Hardly representative of the constant-upgrade user.
I’m always curious to see these stats and the trends.
For instance, the GeForce 8800 cards are trending up. They gained 1.11% this month. Odd for such an old card. They’re hard to find these days. More likely the trend comes from all those new Steam users they added with Modern Warfare 2 and the sales and stuff, who happen to have older systems.
Primary Desktop resolution is an interesting stat. You would be absolutely SHOCKED how many people run their monitors below its native resolution (not just in games for performance reasons). Microsoft has lots of good data on this:
55% of users with higher resolution monitors leave it at whatever the windows default is, which is lower than the native res. More than half! These aren’t just grandmas and stuff, either. I’ve had to educate people in my WoW guild about changing to their native resolution. Lots of people who play “real” games don’t know about this stuff.
I got this joke, even if no one else did. Of course I was sitting on my comfy couch when I read it, so that probably helped.
Increased wisdom, yet another benefit of that wonder of furniture! But yeah that comment was a little too deadpan for typing, so I can’t blame anyone.
Hey, I’m out of theories. You got a better one?
The only explanation can be… Windows 7 is actually really nice.