Author: John Merlino
Date: 10:52:50 08/15/02
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On August 15, 2002 at 04:51:15, José Carlos wrote: >On August 14, 2002 at 18:15:01, John Merlino wrote: > >>On August 14, 2002 at 17:57:25, Sean Mintz wrote: >> >>>Any idea why a decision was made to not officially support 2000? >> >>A couple of reasons: >> >>1) It is extremely costly to fully test Chessmaster so that it supports a >>particular version of Windows. It was decided to only support those three based >>on the estimates of testing costs and tester availability. >> >>2) Vaguely speaking, Windows 2000 and NT are "business" operating systems, and >>not exactly designed for "the general public". Many Ubi Soft (and other >>companies) do not support Windows 2000/NT for many of their games, based on this >>assumption. >> >>3) Perhaps (I'm not really sure) it was determined that, taking 1) into account, >>the extra cost of testing would not justify the number of units sold to people >>with Windows 2000/NT. >> >>4) Finally, there is the good possibility that the program will work fine on >>those systems anyway. If it does, we can say so on the website (with the >>appropriate caveats, of course). >> >>jm > > I know it wasn't your decision, but still I want to stongly disagree with the >reasons given. > >1) and 4) Many people here (I'm almost sure) would be happy to receive a free >beta and run it for several days under win2k. That way your company would know >(instead of "having a good possibility") whether it works fine on win2k or not. > >2) Win2k professional is largely used by non-business users because it's very >stable and works, in general, much better than win98/ME. > >3) Zero cost for a particular tester and many people using wink2k prof out >there. > > In my opinion it's a big mistake. I use win2k prof, and I'm not gonna buy a >program which is not tested under my OS. Most users will think the same way, so >if you get some comments of CM working on win2k, it won't come from people who >has bought it, but from pirates, which I don't trust. > > José C. You make good arguments. However, you would be quite surprised at how many people who had Windows 2000/NT/XP STILL bought Chessmaster 8000. Admittedly, this is probably because 99% of folks do not read the system requirements. Additionally, Ubi Soft generally does not use "external" beta testers. The only exception I know of is the MM-RPG "Shadowbane". jm
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