Alan Wake = Vista Only

[rubberduck]

well done you've seen a basic principal of business. what you think Microsoft, or MS if you must shorten it M$ makes you look 12, is the only company that ceses to pay the massive costs of supporting an old product after they have made a new one?

Microsoft keep updating and providing you support for your purchase for what 5 years or more, for free , most manufactures of goods give you 1 year warranty after that you can go **** yourself.

If you don't want the new os fine that's your choice don't buy it, you wont get to play a new game big woop they have no obligation to lose money just to help you.

But still if you buy xp now its still making MS money, more so as they are stopping support soon. (iirc)

Firstly, I don't think my post makes me look 12, you're the one telling me to "go **** myself". Seriously, how childish does that make you look?

Secondly, if MS is so great with after sales care then why did it take them so long to acknowledge that there was a problem with the xbox 360 failure rate and extend the warranty beyond 1 year? I'm pretty sure those people who had an xbox fail on day 366 felt pretty screwed over by MS.

You raise some valid points in your post... It's just a shame you can't get them across without soundling like an angry fanboy who may have taken A-Level Business Studies or something!

 

[rubberduck]

Given how small (compared to the PC market) the PC games market is, let alone the market for a specific PC game, this would seem to be a rather flawed strategy.

What's far more likely is that (as we know it does) Vista offers features that XP cannot (it may be able to emluate, but that's not the same thing), due to various rebuilt subsystems, and therefore coding for those systems is likely to lead to a better/easier to program game with more facilities.

You may be right, but didn't MS use the same rationale for Halo 2 being Vista only? I pretty sure a PC running Win XP and directX 9 could do everything that the original xbox could do and more.

I'm not sure if the PC version of Alan Wake will be a direct port of the xbox 360 version or not. If it is then there is no reason for it not being possible to get it running on XP. If it to have improved graphics over the xbox 360 version wouldn't you make sure it was also able to run on XP as well so to maximise the amount of people who are able to buy it?

 

[Dolph]

You may be right, but didn't MS use the same rationale for Halo 2 being Vista only? I pretty sure a PC running Win XP and directX 9 could do everything that the original xbox could do and more.

No, that was what people assumed the reasoning was. The fact that Halo 2 was Live compatible (which requires vista) seems to have escaped them. The tray and play feature (no need to install the game, just stick the disk in and it installs as you use it) also requires vista....

I'm not sure if the PC version of Alan Wake will be a direct port of the xbox 360 version or not. If it is then there is no reason for it not being possible to get it running on XP. If it to have improved graphics over the xbox 360 version wouldn't you make sure it was also able to run on XP as well so to maximise the amount of people who are able to buy it?

That depends on how it's done. If it actually uses DX10 correctly, then running it on XP would produce a noticably worse experience. If it's to be linked to Live again, then it has to be vista based in order to do so, and so on.

You have to balance the requirements and desires of the programming team vs the operating system features and the alternatives such as programming an alternative, less functional path for XP and the associated costs.