Originally posted by Talonsin

2. Other than touch-screen support, there is NO redeeming features about windows 8.  What will win8 give me that win7 does not?  Is it anything worth paying $100 for?  NOPE

 

3. Microsoft refuses to pull its head out of its rear and make a gamer version of its OS.  Lets be honest, most of us gamers dont want or use half the CRAP thats slapped into the windows OS.  For the large amounts of money the engineers at MS make, you would think that at least one brainiac could have come up with a stripped down gamer OS that doesnt suck down the first gig of ram and doesnt take up a 10 gigs of space on the hard drive.

 

To put it simply, MS has lost touch with the real world and its developers are making things designed around only their biggest clients who really dont even know what they need.  This is why we get big bloated OS's packed with features we dont want or need, 

2)  Faster boot times, and on some future CPU architectures, longer battery life.

3)  Given the choice between a normal version of Windows 8 and a cut down version that lost a lot of its capabilities for the same price, which would you choose?

It costs a pro-rated $5 or so to get the amount of system memory that Windows 8 wants to use by itself.  Even if Microsoft could make a new version of Windows that used less memory, by the time it launched, memory would be cheaper yet.  Why bother?

Originally posted by Rossboss

People don't buy Alienware because it's better than everyone else. Alienware is like Mac, you buy it for the brand recognition and the customer service.

If you want a high end gaming laptop, your choices are Alienware, Clevo, and sometimes MSI, depending on how they feel about that year's hardware.  Particular details of what hardware you want may rule out one or more of those, as well.

For a while, if you wanted an 11" laptop that wasn't completely awful at gaming, Alienware was your only option.  Today, Clevo is the only option.

For pre-built consumer desktops, the most common reason to buy whatever brand is not knowing any better.

Originally posted by laokoko

Believe me, developer will port your game if there is a market. 

Developer don't do it now because they dont' want to waste resource on something that don't make them money.

And you should be more worried about your mmorpg get shutdown before windows miracly disappear and get replaced by another OS.

While there's a lot of truth to that, there's also the question of what platforms can handle an MMORPG.  If there were a million people who wanted to play Guild Wars 2 on an iPad, that doesn't mean ArenaNet would be able to make it happen.  Or to take a more extreme case, substitute SNES for iPad.

Originally posted by troublmaker

So there's this game called Wargame:European Escalation.  It is an RTS game that requires a fairly decent system to run.  The game runs on an UltraBook which is a touch screen laptop.  It runs it well.  Presumably you could run any and all MMOs on the market on this touch screen laptop that is truthfully just an expensive ($1500) laptop.

If it runs well on an ultrabook, then it doesn't require a fairly decent system to run.

Ultrabook doesn't mean touch-screen laptop.  It means stupidly thin laptop running a very expensive ULV Intel CPU.

Originally posted by Novusod

Expect to see a serious challenge from Google Chrome in the near future. All Google would need to do is market a little harder and get boxes into stores and they would grab market share quick. Google has the money and the prestige to challenge Microsoft and beat them at their own game. Also if google was really smart they would open a gaming division as well. Ironically the only thing tying me to Windows is the games.

Well yes, the reason so many games are Windows-only is that they use DirectX, which is Windows-only.  It's made by Microsoft, and given away for "free", with the idea being that any games made using it will only run on Windows, so everyone will have to buy Windows to play games.  Through DirectX (or more specifically, Direct3D), Microsoft has played a major role in pushing graphics API capabilities forward.

Google Chrome means you're stuck in a browser, and that means you can't offload much to a video card.  The reasons why that is a problem for games should be obvious.  It might not stay that way forever, but Google Chrome is a long way from being viable for gaming, unless you mean Solitaire.

A number of other platforms are much closer.  OpenGL 4.3 has roughly caught up to Direct3D 11.1, so any platforms that support it can roughly match Windows for graphics capabilities.  At the moment, though, that only means Windows and Linux.  Apple could add Mac OS X to that list any time they decided to write drivers for it, though.

I'm currently playing Heroes Call on Android (vid link).  For a game that plays great on a crappy rooted Kindle Fire, it's outstanding both in terms of visuals and performance.  Whether MMOs will move to tablets I cannot say, but the new kid sure has a lot going for it.

Originally posted by Talonsin

Windows 8 is selling poorly for several reasons

1. Most of use dont want to re-learn where the control panel or printer options is going to be.  For some reason, MS thinks it is creative when they move everything around.  It boggles my mind why they move different settings around so much when most people took the time to figure out where they were in the last OS.

 

2. Other than touch-screen support, there is NO redeeming features about windows 8.  What will win8 give me that win7 does not?  Is it anything worth paying $100 for?  NOPE

 

3. Microsoft refuses to pull its head out of its rear and make a gamer version of its OS.  Lets be honest, most of us gamers dont want or use half the CRAP thats slapped into the windows OS.  For the large amounts of money the engineers at MS make, you would think that at least one brainiac could have come up with a stripped down gamer OS that doesnt suck down the first gig of ram and doesnt take up a 10 gigs of space on the hard drive.

 

To put it simply, MS has lost touch with the real world and its developers are making things designed around only their biggest clients who really dont even know what they need.  This is why we get big bloated OS's packed with features we dont want or need, 

Actually Windows 8 is the least bloated OS yet. It just looks prettier but in fact memory management and lack of software bloat is incredible! I love windows 8 personally, out performs windows 7 in every way.

Originally posted by JimmyYO
Laziness is windows biggest ally. We don't want to learn a whole new OS so most won't give any other a chance.

Well, I also think theres an inherent distrust in free software. Any competitors are likely free or open source downloads. And that usually means more potential headaches than a purchased, supported, standardized OS.

Also, the average person just buys a PC with windows installed and won't ever upgrade or change that until they buy a new computer.

Lastly, Windows works fine! Whether you are using XP 7 Vista even or 8 most people are fine with windows. It does what they want it to do, and thats all that matters. Most people don't care about the politics behind Microsoft's app store policies and market trends open source modding etc etc they just wanna browse the web, play some games, and write papers!

Originally posted by Talonsin3. Microsoft refuses to pull its head out of its rear and make a gamer version of its OS.  Lets be honest, most of us gamers dont want or use half the CRAP thats slapped into the windows OS.  For the large amounts of money the engineers at MS make, you would think that at least one brainiac could have come up with a stripped down gamer OS that doesnt suck down the first gig of ram and doesnt take up a 10 gigs of space on the hard drive.

 

To put it simply, MS has lost touch with the real world and its developers are making things designed around only their biggest clients who really dont even know what they need.  This is why we get big bloated OS's packed with features we dont want or need, 

QFT

I think it's stupid to make any game not using advanced DirectX functionality.

That does not mean it won't run under wine, but you can't make an official linux version running on linux, which mean you basically have to write a new client using OpenGL, which will cost a lot of money which wont make a lot of sense considering most linux users already dual boot windows to play games.

TL;DR : It does not make comercial sense to develop a second client made for linux.

Windows Hardly has a monopoly on the market, if Microsoft made a bad decision (excluding Windows 8, because thats a given) then most GAMERS would switch to Linux or some other OS.

Windows has the advantage of being a trusted brand, despite its less than stellar decisions or customer support at times, all it takes to dethrone them is for them to make a couple of 'game-breaking' decisions and there will be some competitor there to pick on their carcass.

The future, in my opinion, is Cloud Gaming, where games arent determined by the device they are designed for, but for which device you currently have handy.

I'd say the Industry is already pretty close to the point where we can take our Desktop games on the road with us on our mobile or tablets, then when we get home, we can use our TV's or desktops to continue those same games.

Originally posted by Kreedz

Windows Hardly has a monopoly on the market, if Microsoft made a bad decision (excluding Windows 8, because thats a given) then most GAMERS would switch to Linux or some other OS.

Windows has the advantage of being a trusted brand, despite its less than stellar decisions or customer support at times, all it takes to dethrone them is for them to make a couple of 'game-breaking' decisions and there will be some competitor there to pick on their carcass.

 

The future, in my opinion, is Cloud Gaming, where games arent determined by the device they are designed for, but for which device you currently have handy.

I'd say the Industry is already pretty close to the point where we can take our Desktop games on the road with us on our mobile or tablets, then when we get home, we can use our TV's or desktops to continue those same games.

I disagree a lot with that first statement. It would take A LOT like Microsoft raped my baby a lot to ever get me to switch to Linux. Also, every developer would have to suddenly port all their games to Linux, and no I'm not using windows emulators just to play games if Windows still works enough to play them.

[quote]Originally posted by Fendel84M
[b][quote]Actually Windows 8 is the least bloated OS yet. It just looks prettier but in fact memory management and lack of software bloat is incredible! I love windows 8 personally, out performs windows 7 in every way.[/b][/quote]

Agreed. 99% of the "Windows 8 sucks!" crowd have never used it, they've just seen a screenshot of the tile screen and though "that looks weird and different". There is absolutely no doubt that Win8 outperforms Win7 considerably.

/Doom

/laugh

Originally posted by Gothikaboy

I think it's stupid to make any game not using advanced DirectX functionality.

That does not mean it won't run under wine, but you can't make an official linux version running on linux, which mean you basically have to write a new client using OpenGL, which will cost a lot of money which wont make a lot of sense considering most linux users already dual boot windows to play games.

 

TL;DR : It does not make comercial sense to develop a second client made for linux.

Why DirectX rather than OpenGL?  OpenGL runs on Windows, too, you know.  If you you've already made a game in DirectX, then you might not want to port it to OpenGL.  But the converse is also true:  if you've made a game in OpenGL, there's no point in porting it to DirectX.  If you haven't already made either, then why is it so stupid to start with OpenGL rather than DirectX?

OpenGL is really only equivalent to the Direct3D portion of DirectX, as DirectX includes sound, network, and so forth.  But considering that many other platforms besides Windows have had plenty of sound and network capabilities (e.g., basically every single recent smartphone or tablet), I don't think those are the real barriers to moving away from DirectX.

For quite a while, Direct3D was way ahead of OpenGL.  OpenGL roughly caught up to DirectX 10 only slightly before DirectX 11 released.  But today, OpenGL has caught up.  Can you name any advantages of Direct 3D 11 or 11.1 (your choice) over OpenGL 4.3?  Going back a generation, can you name any advantages of Direct 3D 10 or 10.1 (again, your choice) over OpenGL 3.3?

Most of a game client neither knows nor cares whether you're using Direct3D or OpenGL.  Moving from one to the other does require substantial work to port some things, but most of the code would be left alone.  If Linux had a 20% market share, most games would be written in OpenGL from the start and available for both Windows and Linux.

Originally posted by Kreedz

The future, in my opinion, is Cloud Gaming, where games arent determined by the device they are designed for, but for which device you currently have handy.

I'd say the Industry is already pretty close to the point where we can take our Desktop games on the road with us on our mobile or tablets, then when we get home, we can use our TV's or desktops to continue those same games.

Streaming games over a LAN will probably find a niche, but cloud gaming over the Internet at large is unlikely to ever catch on.  It doesn't have any chance until Internet connections have enough bandwidth that ISPs aren't particularly bothered by typical customers using several TB of bandwidth per month, as before then, ISPs will throttle bandwidth on game streaming to sabotage it.

Furthermore, cloud gaming has no chance after everyone has devices that can render the game just fine locally without needing to stream it.  Budget gaming desktops are basically there for most games, and budget gaming laptops aren't far behind.  That would relegate cloud gaming to tablets and cell phones, and even tablets will probably get the hardware capabilities needed to run most games well locally well before they get the Internet bandwidth to stream them well.

Originally posted by Fendel84M

Originally posted by Kreedz

Windows Hardly has a monopoly on the market, if Microsoft made a bad decision (excluding Windows 8, because thats a given) then most GAMERS would switch to Linux or some other OS.

Windows has the advantage of being a trusted brand, despite its less than stellar decisions or customer support at times, all it takes to dethrone them is for them to make a couple of 'game-breaking' decisions and there will be some competitor there to pick on their carcass.

 

The future, in my opinion, is Cloud Gaming, where games arent determined by the device they are designed for, but for which device you currently have handy.

I'd say the Industry is already pretty close to the point where we can take our Desktop games on the road with us on our mobile or tablets, then when we get home, we can use our TV's or desktops to continue those same games.

I disagree a lot with that first statement. It would take A LOT like Microsoft raped my baby a lot to ever get me to switch to Linux. Also, every developer would have to suddenly port all their games to Linux, and no I'm not using windows emulators just to play games if Windows still works enough to play them.

It depends on what sort of mistake Microsoft makes.  If Microsoft were to declare that all future versions of Windows would be closed platforms, I think you'd see a transition happen pretty fast.  Not necessarily to Linux, but someone might make a new OS to try to steal Microsoft's Windows cash cow.

Originally posted by Wicoa
Actually I have been annoyed at the slowness in the merging of pc's and consoles. So much so I think PCs will win in the end,  already we are seeing smaller and smaller boxes put together able to be moved around.

PCs are open platforms and consoles are closed platforms.  You can't merge the two.