McTesla: Sure, there are games you can run on limited hardware but Endzone at least is not one of them, as the simulation aspects of it are too demanding for "office" grade hardware.
The Steam hardware survey is not only about Steam, don't fall into that trap. We love GOG but the Steam Hardware stats are, as I wrote, an industry standard for game developers to analyse what hardware "the average gamer" has at the moment. This is, because Steam has many many players, therefore it has a lot DATA, making it a reliable statistical source for game development.
Please don't ignore what I wrote about Unity, this was my main point.
MFED: Ich habe ein Hochleistungs-Laptop mit einer NVIDIA-GPU, reichlich RAM, und starker Intel-CPU, und dieser Rechner ist auch mein Office-PC. Warum müssen deiner Ansicht nach alle Office-PCs "limited" sein? Klär mich mit der Steam-Hardware-survey auf, die nicht nur über Steam sei?! Wenn ich als Spieler mich nur auf GOG bewege, welchen Einfluss hat dies auf die Steam-survey? Was ist aber wenn, Origin, GOG oder Uplay ganz andere Daten zu Windows 7 haben...das sind seit Jahrzehnten etablierte Unternehmen mit Millionen Kunden und Spielern, sind diese Quellen weniger zuverlässig??
Steam Hardware Survey, which is a game related hardware survey tells me, as a developer: Less than 8% of people use Windows 7 as an OS, across the ENTIRE Steam user base.
Your linked survey tells me, of all the desktop PCs it has gathered 30% use Windows 7.
As a game developer, I chose to rely on Steam as a more relevant statistical source.
AFAIK only Steam releases its hardware statistics publicly. And they do have the largest user base when it comes to desktop gaming. We do make the assumption that the player base between Steam users and GOG users are not entirely different (when it comes to hardware and OS installations), which I'm very confident about that this is a true statement.
But, I don't want to loose valuable time arguing about which statistical data points are more trustworthy or relevant. We chose to be transparent not promising what we can't keep, because we use third party technology (Unity) that might abandon Windows 7 support (which is NOT officially supported by Microsoft anymore). Please accept that fact.
Here are all the facts:
- We do want to support more OSs in the future, including MacOS and experimental Linux support. At the moment, focusing our development effort on making the game better has the highest priority, so we can't make any promises right now. There won't be any officially supported Windows 7 version however.
- As of now, game relevant hardware statistics indicate that only a very small percentage of "players" (not overall users) is still using Windows 7 and Microsoft has abandoned official support.
- Without official Windows 7 support by Microsoft, third parties (like Unity Technologies) may drop support for it soon, making it very hard if not impossible, for small to medium sized game studios to support this OS
