> Anyways, I highly doubt windows would be the preferred gaming platform today if they didn't value this backwards compatibility. God knows that the OS sucks in

> Anyways, I highly doubt windows would be the preferred gaming platform today if they didn't value this backwards compatibility. God knows that the OS sucks in so many areas. Most people would love to switch to something better, but the fact that windows makes it so easy to develop something and have it just work for 25 years clearly has a large impact on how many developers it attracts. This is interesting as a comment, because trying to run older games on Windows 10 is actually very difficult and is not tremendously successful without third party/fan patches & compatibility layers. eg: take an at the time very popular game like The Sims 2, and try to run that on Windows 10. If you have a disc copy, SafeDisc/SecuROM probably no longer function and you can't start it at all (this affects lots of older titles). Get past that and you'll get it to run, but it won't recognise your hardware and will lock itself to super low settings, and modern GPUs & modern GPU drivers have a tendency to make it just crash or render incorrectly. Fixing those requires fan patches or the use of DXVK. Running it on CPUs with multiple cores can make it just crash. This is just one game, but the story is pretty similar for a lot of games from 10+ years ago - there's an amount of backwards compatibility, but it's not nearly as rosy a story as it first appears, and older games seem to be a particularly bad case for it. There's a whole wiki about getting games to work right - https://www.pcgamingwiki.com https://www.pcgamingwiki.com We can always find technical reasons and deficiencies in the original apps that explain why these games break, but "someone didn't write it right 15 years ago but it kinda worked then by accident" doesn't help the end user. edit: oh, and from my personal experience, it's worse on Windows 11 than Win10!