Mr.Tea said:
It's interesting that you'd bring up consoles... Would you expect an 11 year old console to be supported with new (and AAA) games?
There's nothing wrong with keeping an old console to play old games, or with keeping WinXP if you like it so much, but expecting new releases to support it? That's ludicrous.
Also, the "no reason to upgrade" thing baffles me. New releases and new technology are the reason! If no developer makes games that are incompatible with XP and no one switches from XP because everything is forever compatible with it, then neither software nor hardware grows, advances or evolves. Moore's Law is rendered useless and invalid and technology comes to a screeching halt. And for what? Because Windows XP is "good enough"? Well it's not.
Any OS that works is "good enough", should we just stop?
Windows XP was an aberration of Microsoft's OS development schedule and now that people have been using it for so long, they fight tooth and nail against upgrading it. It's time that changed and I sincerely hope more and more software drops support for XP until we finally reach its end-of-life in 2014.
Im afraid you missed my point. I was not saying developers SHOULDNT do this. In fact I was not addressing this at the developers in any way shape or form. Of course developers should be migrating away from xp at this point. I mean I fully understand why people dont want to upgrade an OS when what they have works. However the division between XP and 7 is one that presents a functional one, specifically the DX limitation. That is in effect the ONLY reason to migrate to 7. If not for that there would not be a viable reason to do so. However it is what it is, It is present and with that presence its to be expected for this forcible change.
But then youve taken this in a different direction. Remove DX from the equation there is no reason to do it, and upgrading for simply the concept of upgrading is not only ignorant, it serves no purpose but to line software companies pockets with money for doing essentially nothing. That is a massive problem this industry, the software industry in general, and Most digital industry face now because of the ignorance of consumers. So encouraging that is a dangerous thing.
Thats why people are fighting tooth and nail against upgrading, they have no individual need to do so and do not want to be told "YOU NEED THIS" when they know what they need. Its not because they are just being resistant to change... Its because some people still have the computing wherewithall to understand what they need, and not just blindly accept what ever the developer tells them, be it for patching, or updates, service packs, expansions, new installments. And there is entirely too much momentum now behind the apple centric philosophy of just trusting them to know what is right, instead of understanding the equipment you are using.
Now I only pointed to the console version because its easily going to be another 1-2 years before the abundance of games released on PC will not support XP. So abandoning ship and buying the New OS while it still at inflated price makes a lot less sense, than to buy this one release on console and still get dozens of PC tiles through the next two years. Between that time and now, the OS should drop to more respectable pricing as Win8 comes out. THEN there is viable justification for upgrading. Not upgrading because kids who wanna act like they are on the bleeding edge, just throw money at something for nothing, when they dont even really comprehend it.