For Windows 7, they pulled the plug on DirectX, and targeted gamers who had to upgrade from Windows XP to be able to use DirectX 11. Under the belt, but worked

For Windows 7, they pulled the plug on DirectX, and targeted gamers who had to upgrade from Windows XP to be able to use DirectX 11. Under the belt, but worked as expected. For Windows 8, they're pulling the plug on freelance developers (who can still btw develop for Windows 7 if they are okay with VS 10 Express). For now this doesn't seem to hurt because of the following reasons - a) Gamers are indeed a vast majority of people who consciously choose Windows for a valid reason, that most mainstream games for PCs are still built with DirectX. They had no choice but to upgrade. b) How does hurting the free developer help your case? Only that this will encourage people to build more Windows 8 stuff, but - c) Devs can still continue to develop for Windows 7/XP using VS 10 Express. Granted, VS 11 will bring some attractive features in the language. d) Point remains that ordinary users, gamers included, will be scarcely affected. I just hope they're not planning anything else like the DX11 crap they pulled last time. Also wish a good graphics/multi-media framework gets developed in Linux which can give strong competition to DirectX.