Is the game industry skipping Directx 10?

It will be two years in November since Microsoft shipped Vista with DirectX 10. Its been a long 2 years and the game industry has had lots of time to develop for the new standard. Yet, new games are being developed without the support for DirectX 10 (Fallout 3 for instance). The market only holds 18 games (Some patched to work with DirectX 10), and just a few more titles are expected to show up as late as 2009.

Follow up:

Vista is such a resource hungry operating system, that developers even have to split the requirements from XP. Requirements range up to 17% over XP (2.0GHz on XP to 2.4GHz on Vista). Such high difference puts Vista out of the gaming market.

Microsoft's gamer market still sits on XP, since most gamers chose not to switch due to the performance pullback. Video game companies are very much aware of this fact and most likely have/will decide not to develop for DirectX 10, pushing up release dates and spending less money.

With the announcement of Windows 7 came the announcement of DirectX 11, which includes new and more advanced features. With this in mind, game developers may very well skip DirectX 10 and go for the 11th version. Why? Because the industry expects Windows 7 to be a hit. Instead of pouring money into something that soon will be replaced, developers are hoping that the new platform will be more accepted.

Hardware is another issue. Despite the fact that DirectX cards have been around for a while, its still not uncommon for people to have a card that doesn't. As far as things go, if you either have a new computer or your a real video game enthusiast, you probably have a card the doesn't support DirectX 10. Most acceptable mid range Directx cards have just recently joined the market anyways.

If Microsoft wants to attract video game companies to DirectX 10, the only way for that to happen is if DirectX 10 would appear on XP. However, from the looks of it, Microsoft has put its hopes on DirectX ll and left the 10th version as a Vista premium.

My personal expectation is that the DirectX 10 market will stop at 25-30 games in total. Most games, instead of supporting DirectX 10 will probably wait for the 11th version. There is no point anyways if its not available for XP.