Hi, can someone just give me a rough estimate of how much perecent of customers I would loose if my game was only available for Win 95 and 98. Thanks!

I dont have any numbers for you, but I would think that to make a game only run on 95/98 and NOT run on 2000/ME/XP would take a fair bit of conscious effort on your part, and in most cases I think it would be arbitrary. In general, the only categories of apps that will run on 98/98 but not 2000/ME/XP are system apps (like defragger, anti virus, etc) and DOS apps (which I suspect you arent writing). Other than that, you usually have to go out of your way to not make it work. Just to help you out and make sure you are making the right decision, could you maybe give us a clue as to why you made such a choice.

Hey,
I think he means his game won''t be available for Linux, Mac, etc... If that''s the case, and don''t take my word as the gospel on this topic as I''m not a businessman, I don''t expect you''ll lose too many sales.
However, if your program doesn''t run on Win2000 or WinMe (and I don''t know why you''d want to do that, since Win95 games will already run on Win2k machines), you might lose a considerable user base.

--Nairb

I say you lose close to 95 % of your business.
All new product introductions to store byuers requires XP compatible.

quote: Original post by Nairb
(and I don''t know why you''d want to do that, since Win95 games will already run on Win2k machines)

As a sad matter of fact, not necessarly...

Since quite a few existing games don''t run on XP as it is, and I haven''t seen many companies rushing to fix this, I''d say that 95% is maybe just a tad high of an estimate. If you remember there were quite a few problems with 2000 when it first came out, but they cleared up quick enough. Simple fact is that the majority of users use Windows. How many times have you seen a Windows port of a Linux game, eh?

At google, I remember a nice little pie chart showing what operating systems people were using. I think when I looked, win 98 had about 50% of the share. But, your target audience might be the people who never use google, or always upgrade straight away, so it is really only a quick guide... at least there is a fairly large sample size

Trying is the first step towards failure.

Hypothetical situation that I''ve been mulling around with. Is it technically feasible to bypass the Windows monopoly by making games that have their own integrated operating systems.
My idea was to develop the game for Linux and then simply, have the people boot into the Linux partition and straight into and out of the game. Is that technically and/or legally possible?

Also, I''ve been looking around in the reasons why most business fail. Most of them seem to deal with poor organization and getting screwed by the publisher. How difficult would it be to be your own publisher, say over the Internet?

god knows why but its easy to write a game on 95/98 that crashes randomly on Win2k. you MUST develop on win2k!
I think win2k crashes the moment it hits an error but win95/98 sometimes dont spot the error and bumble on regardless.
I had a lot of issues like this when i developed on win98.

http://www.positech.co.uk

Um - the booting thing aint worth it... I keep getting NASTY, EVIL flashbacks of having a boot disk for every single game I owned back in the day. Was the biggest pain in the ass ever! Not to mention if you are thinking of hacking your own OS in to the game... Just think about hardware compatabilty. I seriously doubt you are gonna convince nVidia to write you a driver specific to your game...

Oh well,
Landskecht