Windows is not going to just die. There is no need to wory about games leaving the Win32 platform UNTIL something better actually comes along. Its just suppy and demand. There REALLY is not other platform for games. I mean... is Mac going to take over. I think not. Linux is ever farther off as far as having a good set of APIs or a large installed base of home PC users. Keep in mind the type of people who play games. MS has raised them to know as little about the PC as possible. So anything to replace Windows must be at least as powerful as windows and as least as simple as windows. In my opinion it would take much more than that to supplant windows because who actually wants to go and change their platform and find new programs that almost do what their old programs did fine. Back in the day when the market was still very unstable things where up in the air. Now MS is the PC market.. and its a huge market. Huge markets are not prone to radical change. Its not MS who holds the market together its all the users and developers. The OS is just a medium that they communicate through. I think things will eventually go the way of platform independance.. but not for another 10 years or maybe 20. In any case the market will not just dump its developers.. It can''t because it relies on them. You see there is no secret network of developers looking to take you job away with some PC revolution. There is a shortage of developers and the market has to work with what it can get. The game market will simply have to develop around developers and if anyone really get to say what platform games run on then its developers. Take John Carmack for example. I don''t agree with what he did but he almost single handedly force OpenGL on the Win32 platform. This made for a lot of bugs and problems and all in all headaches for end users. Looking at D3D then .. sure it sucked.. but now its better than ever and openGL really has few advantages and little support from developers. But, that is a good example of just how much sway developers have in the market. Of course we can''t all be John Carmack.. although I am trying To summerize.. whatever happens will happen gradually. Those who put their knowledge in the right places will be in greater demand while those who are programming in VB will be in less demand, but there is not going to be any radical overnight changes in the gaming world. If another OS wants to take over then it will almost definately have to use DirectX and Win32. They could do that legally if the government could rule those APIs to be public or through reverse engeneeriing like IBM did for DOS back in the day. But Linux, MAC, Beos are years away from being half of the gaming platform that Windows is. The only changing of guard we may see if Windows getting is ass kicked as a server platform. As a gaming platform it will rule supreme for quite some time. In fact I would say the most valid competition will only come from consoles. Playstation 2 to be exact.. but in any case consoles are headed the wrong way. In the days of high bandwidth online gaming conoles are just getting keyboards and 56k modems. I see no reason to fear.

"If another OS wants to take over then it will almost definately have to use DirectX and Win32."

Check out wine, a Windows emulator for UNIX. I believe its quite legal, and yes it runs DirectX applications too. I might add its not that stable, but hell i ran Starcraft faster using it then i did in Windows.