Poll: what if Unity dropped old OSes?

So to be clear, you're suggesting Windows XP and OS X 10.5 will be the new minimum OS's in the future? Sounds fine to me.

 

Why trouble you and us by supporting totally outdated OSes and thus preventing Unity to move forward... or at least to move forward faster ...
Dropping them would sacrifice a few people using these OSes while keeping them would negatively affect the vast majority of the user base ^^.

 

Nobody in the world with any sense except the stuffiest possible business will use them. Serious indies wanting every last drop from an old machine know not to touch unity.

Imagine the resources you would have not supporting those.


You don't know the power of the dark side

 

Wait wait wait. You guys go through the trouble of supporting OSes that only take up 0.4% of the market. Probably on computers that are a decade old and can't even run a decent game?.... Why do you even ask lol.

 

If a browser has less than 0.5% market share or equal to visitor demographics I always convince the client to drop support unless it is a new browser just beginning to gain traction, e.g. Safari mobile in 2007. Only time I cannot talk them around is when they consider they cannot possibly exclude their ancient grandmother and her even more ancient AOL browser running on Windows 95. Drop the old browsers. Most desktop games from the casual companies do not even support anything older than XP. I don't think the new Flash even runs on anything older than XP but don't quote me on that.

 

Yupp get rid of them. Interestingly I missed this poll but instinctively added it as addon on the gpu dropping poll feedback hehe

 

I'm not familiar with OSX pre-Snow Leopard but anything pre-XP is pretty ancient. Even XP diehards sound old to me these days.

 

Windows XP's marketshare is around 38% as of August 2011. Doesn't sound like a small demographic to me.

 

Even here at work we use XP SP3, anythig older than that (XP) is too old, drop!

 

Yes, it is right to drop old systems that are tiny percentages of the market. Thank you for asking first.

 

There is really no need to keep them. PowerPC computers really are outdated. They run up to Leopard, but work best with tiger, which itself is outdated. I say move forward. Did Japan keep feudalism just because a few samurais didn't want to give up their swords? Or did they go full steam ahead and industrialize the county?

 

... it's time to let go... U____U

 

good to get rid of them =)

 

I trying to imagine a unity game running on win 2k regardless of whether or not you support it!

I thought we'd be talking about when to drop XP! (Yes it's still a viable platform ATM).

 

Never!

 

Why are the other voters not speaking up? do they just mash voting options and wander off randomly?

 

hop hop bye bye prehistoric OS XDD...well no regret either for me if this happens...

 

And say what? The vote I cast pretty much says all I need to say on the subject matter.

 

I say drop them all its not whorth it.

 

I'm still using Windows XP and like it better than Windows 7 ... but anything older than that really seems ancient. And I do have a Windows 7 license ... just don't feel like touching my virtual machine that's running XP really nicely (and my main OS is Mac OS X Snow Leopard anyways).

Not too long ago I saw some people here were still using PPC and I guess that will cut off some people ... but ... I never test my games on PPC anyways and do remember that in the past there was trouble with PPC (that was with networking, IIRC). So I don't mind if that's history, too.

And ... friends asking me questions about Mac OS X 10.4 or even older get "upgrade your system" as the only answer ;-)

 

I'm affraid Windows XP's days are numbered. Extended support ends on April 8th, 2014.

 

Oh this is music to my ears~!




Yeh, while you guys are at it, DROP FUTURE LINUX SUPPORT TOO !! They are below 2% anyway!

WHO'S WITH ME!!
I know you are Eric5h5 !

Seriously, the above is the argument I have been saying all along. Why spend valuable time energy on an OS with less than 2% of market share when UT can focus and make Unity better on the more profitable market (iOS/Windows/OSX/Android) for its customers.

 

Don't start that. (I don't use Linux; I just don't want an argument)

 

Well I'd be interested to know just why some people voted to keep archaic outdated 12 year old operating systems.

 

Haha! High 5 !

Let me say it again. Outdated 20 years old operating system with LESS THAN 2% MARKET SHARE !! Seriously, WTF are some people thinking!

 

The same thing they think when they still build ARMV6 or ARMV6+ARMV7 for iOS, that stone age is entitled to be not kicked with all possible force out of this solar system
Interestingly on ARMV6 nobody seems to realize that supporting it isn't worth it, but here people do

 

You realize that's almost 3 years away? That's like a millenium in tech time. Neglecting 38% of the current market share would be really, really, really stupid.

 

ARMV6 still has significant market share on iOS - with around 12.23%!
That's 1 in 8 iOS device that still runs on ARMV6 !!
My source : http://twotribes.com/message/ios-idevices-breakdown/

 

Seeing that a tiny percentage of Unity users still use PowerPC and Windows 2000 there is honestly no need to keep support for them. I haven't seen a Windows 2000 machine for about 5 or 6 years.

 

Since the ToS change in 2010 that prevents statistic providers like flurry etc to generate global stats, those figures are meaningless.

Just cause 1 app had 12% (which it doesn't see below) doesn't mean much and I also doubt its accuracy as the last stats that flurry and others could do already prior the iPhone4 release had the ARMV6 generation down to < 20% and we all know that the iphone4 and ipad2 have each sold more devices within 3 months than the 2nd gen during their whole year (the first 2 generations at their highest had a userbase of 20M devices, that was prior the 4th gen rotations - and without considering the trivial fact that the iOS install base is well beyond 220M devices so even at pure max it could have 9% if those stone age devices weren't put away already for all who had their contract renewal)

also if you really look at the stats then can you explain me how you dream up 12% for the 2nd gen?
The share there for iphone3g is 4.7%. the "other" block has to be ignored, because it to a large degree the iTouch 3GS in it (extrapolated from the inner circle where the other block had the same size but itouch 2G was still around on its own), 1st gen can't have any impact they already were far below 2% during 3GS days.

 

I was just adding Others with 3G - because I assume all pre 2G iOS devices were lumped in that category.
But yeh, to be honest, I would support the drop on 2G devices too.

From the sound of it (what Aras is asking) it sounds like Unity is going to drop fix pipeline all together in favour of deferred (SM2+).

 

drop!

 

drop them!!

 

Actually, as an indie one of my competitive advantages is making games for older machines. AAA studios support the latest greatest much more effectively that I can (with mobile being the only current level playing field.. and even then at times).

I'd like to see older system support remain. If you didn't then I'd likely keep 3.4 untouched just to target those systems.

 

Quick question, that applies to both polls today, what are the minimum support standards for the game portals? ie. let's not drop below a primary distribution channel standards... they are slow to adopt Unity games in the first place, if we set a bar above their minimum they may not take well to that.

Just a thought.

Thanks,

Galen

 

How could targeting a demographic that makes up 0.1% of the population be a competitive advantage?

 

Well... they have fewer choices for new games, quality expectations are within Unity 3/indie range, 0.1% represents (according to Wiki: "As of June 2008, the number of personal computers in use worldwide hit one billion") is 10 million potential customers, and their money is still good to me

Of course if you're done with them, then I'll do what I can to fill in

Cheers,

Galen

 

which isn't a lot as systems with GPUs that would be dropped and alike are that slow that they can not even make use of current day broadband connections anymore in any reasonable way

 

Drop them. I highly doubt people running those OS are playing games anyways.

 

I voted yes to all. If Unity stops supporting those platforms, then I don't have to think about supporting them, either (and I can stop making those Mac universal builds). Same argument for armv6 by the way.

 

Wasn't advocating anything, just supplying facts. We went to our state IT department earlier this year to request that they allow us to move to Win 7 from XP and they didn't even know about this. Waiting until the last minute to make sure your software that is 10 years old will run on the newest OS is not a recipe for success. Especially when you have a full plate of projects every year as it is.

 

Drop em ...

The market share they represent does not cover the cost to keep unity compatible, I'm pretty sure of that. Not to mention that they slows down unity's progress, if not technically then probably financially.

For us, the game developers, if you are worried about losing the ability to tap in to the small market share they represent then your probably doing something wrong any way's.

and the same for that other poll ofc ...

 

Drop em please.

 

I'd be fine if they were dropped, my mom doesn't play games.

 

Anecdote from current client project: We decided that for version 1.0 of our product, which has a price of $15,000 per install, that we would ship the software on a bundled mid-range laptop to cut down on installation issues. Our institutional clients mainly a variety of machines, many of them very old. The test machine I have for one our of larger customers is an HP Compaq single core machine with 512MB of RAM running Windows XP -- no, not SP2 or SP3, just Windows XP, period -- an integrated Intel graphics chipset and a 40GB hard drive. We cannot make our high-end medical simulation run on that kind of hardware at any reasonable frame rate or in any reasonable time frame. Our content takes up about 60GB and will only get bigger in the future. Any reasonably modern mid-range machine manufactured in the past 3 years should be capable of handling our software. The machines installed at institutional clients are never upgraded, have an IT support staff that are positively draconian in what can and cannot be done with the machine, and were mainly purchased for running a DVD training video or office applications.

This is a single data-point and you can draw any conclusions from it you like. I mention it only to illustrate the fact that even though the Unity player works on the machine, the machine does not meet functional specifications for our software. There are people out there with much older hardware that just will not or cannot upgrade for a variety of reasons, but there are diminishing returns and increasing support costs after a while.

 

Drop them all!
Keep XP and OS 10.6 the minimum!

 

Drop them !!!

 

Almost all standalone titles don't support PPC anyway, so you should drop it.

 

Self-contradictory argument FTW...