amirsan said:
BTW, If this is a widespread problem, I dont see why Firaxis wouldn't release something as soon as possible... or else they will really be losing alot of sales.
I don't think they will lose that many sales. I think they have probably sold over a 100.000 copies by now world wide, and I think there are only a few hundred people that actually bought the game and have a non-supported hardware configuration.
Most of the problems that I see in the tech support forum are related to laptops, and those same laptops will have trouble running most of the 3D games released this year (think Sims 2, Quake 4, other popular titles) and they did not lose a lot of sales either.
I have heard this dozens of times before over the years....
"If they don't make this game work in 16 Bit Windows they are going to lose a lot of sales" - when Windows 95 was released and so were 32 Bit games.... that wouldn't always run on Windows 3.1, even with their Win32 extension.
"If they don't make this DOS game work in Windows they are going to lose a lot of sales" - when DOS games were still sold to the market and you could only run them in DOS-mode in Windows 95 or 3.1x
"If they don't make this new game work in Windows 95, they are going to lose a lot of sales" - when support for Windows 95 was dropped back in 2000 or so and you had to have at least Windows 98.
"If they don't make this game work with Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 cards they are going to lose a lot of sales" - on the Gaming industry dropping support for the older 3dfx Voodoo type cards in 2001 or so when NVidia and ATI chips started to dominate the market.
And the general statement:
"If they don't make <insert game here> on <insert my config here> there are going to lose a lot of sales!"
The bottomline: A game company caters to 90% of the users and knows 10% of the users won't be able to play the game because of the hardware requirements. They are in this business to make money, not to spend a lot more money on development to make sure all systems can use their game.
Even MMORPG's that cost you $15 per month don't go that far. At some time you need to upgrade, or not play on a laptop.
The chances on a patch that will allow the game to be run on systems below the current system requirements is practically zero. There may be some workarounds to work around the requirements with software T&L emulation, etc, but on the core side you will continue to have certain problems if you don't meet the system requirments.
They won't lose a lot of sales. I think the majority of the people have no problem, just bought the game and started playing.
