I got curious and I had a windows xp ISO lying around, apparently it does support migrating from win98 onwards which surprised me a bit, win95 has to do a fresh install. From looking at the various .inf files it seems to pull a lot more information from a NT based starting point than 9x. I'm not sure if I'm curious enough to try a 98 to NT5 upgrade in a VM though.
Whether or not many people would want to do that upgrade/migration is another question, but similar to you I doubt the number was high.
For the kinds of games where DRM free matters, where they don't have a prominent online/multiplayer side or the equivalent of playing the game 'from the disc', is the console subscription really an issue? I don't have a console myself, but from when I've looked into it there's a bunch of mainly free to play games where that subscription isn't needed as both the publisher and Sony/MS get their money from purchases.
I wonder if this signals anything about Sony's attitude to blu-ray movies. Aside from games one of the reasons their consoles have sold well is because they've been excellent physical media players. The PS2 for DVDs and the PS3 onwards for blu-ray.
If I remember well PS3 was during the period where blu-ray lasers were production constrained and more expensive with Sony prioritizing their own devices, so the console was price and availability competitive against dedicated disc players by third parties. And the PS3 had pretty long term update/support. I'm fairly sure that had an impact on the financial side as it was in the era when console hardware was subsidized on the expectation they'd get a slice of game sales, except those consoles bought for primarily for movies didn't reimburse them so well.
I wonder where all the artists who used to make the wide range of styles for XP went after MS made it harder to apply themes to windows, or what factors contributed to attracting artists to start making that kind of customization. I think partially it's down to the platform many use (many seek to theme mobile OSes), but the tools to do so has to be a large contribution. I'm not aware of anything like Stardock's Skin studio that exists outside windows, and from looking at their website it's now useless for anything past win10 1909. Having their art seen on widely used platforms (OS or applications) has to be a large draw to it as well.
Isn't that a consequence of it being a fairly open platform and no certification gatekeeper before a developer can release/update their game? The platform isn't specifically steam or where mouse/keyboard is unavailable or inconvenient, it's generally what they think most of their target market will be using which is likely a generic windows desktop. I don't think developers or valve themselves would want to set up certification and enforcement to say "you must have X in your game otherwise you can't release on steam", especially for the wide range of categories of criteria you could possibly think of, and someone out there will want a way to do text input on their steering wheel for a driving simulator. PC gaming casts such a wide net it's likely an impossible task.
For what it's worth, my ASUS motherboard from 2017 has their overclocking utility branded as "AI suite 3" (implying there were 2 before). I think having a buzzword to slap on products that fits the latest trend is a checkbox for whoever is marketing these, whether or not it fits any textbook definition of that term.
It was also around the time of the early netbooks, when the premise was a lean laptop and you'd do tasks that'd usually be done with relatively demanding local clients by the browser, as google and others were improving their online app offerings. They'd be using things like SATA/IDE to compact flash adapters to keep power down and responsiveness up, they were an ideal candidate for early SSDs as they didn't need a lot of capacity to run a linux + lightweight DE. Then they became just cheap laptops running full windows.
That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity for spam for a lot longer, in a way the Win8 live tiles were an evolution of the widgets that first appeared in Vista, and they introduced active wallpaper along with IE4 (or was it Win98?) although that opportunity would have been much less effective as internet availability was much less.
I'd say that comes down to the difference between requirements (i.e. will it run at all, does it use features only found in win11) and support, and the developer's decisions around that. I can appreciate not supporting win10 even if it runs as they have a written or implied burden to make sure it keeps operating correctly for the lifespan, and that may include keeping test systems around or handling bugs that turn up in the OS that's getting reduced support itself, or other factors like drivers. Then there's the question of whether people would be willing to pay for a "your mileage may vary" level of support on something commercial.
My sense of it is that as linux is gradually inching towards the general power user audience, there's a lot of "just use [distro]" or fashionable distros where they're all seen as flavors of one thing. In a sense that's true, but not in others like this. I'd also add the various atomic distros like Silverblue or derivatives which have other conditions you need to learn to work with. For AUR it seems to get recommended as a secondary way to get software, if it hasn't been brought into the original distros package repos then the next step is to just search AUR, make the shortest line to the goal and don't worry about the details.
As far as Arch goes, I wonder if Arch-based CachyOS is a factor as it's seen the high performance desktop linux.
One related question that you need to follow that with is the associated costs of switching the whole studio to another engine that's technically better, or if proposing teach studio tailor-make their own engine the costs of that engineering, if presumably they have or learn the expertise to surpass whatever they're using currently.
I'm not a game developer, but it would also seem to be a link between resource usage by the engine, and whatever content the production side are making. For all the commentary about how brilliant the id software engines are, if you examine the levels you pass through they're also very efficient with what they demand out of the engine - it's like an orchestra playing well together, not one instrument that means you can do anything.
The way of observing it I find concerning is if you look at PC gaming (or personal computing in general) as a population, with a rate of new entrants or 'birth rate' and people exiting or 'death rate'. It's hard to be optimistic with raising barriers to entry, upgrading or replacing failed hardware which seems like it'd shrink that population over the long term, and make it less attractive to invest in. This isn't even new with the influence of AI, crypto mining was similar but in retrospect just a taster course.
One tangent from this is that few of the big 'household name' tech products that have become infrastructure for modern life for huge amounts of people seem to be allowed to be mature and stable, they must be kept changing (beyond maintenance) or to offer some other new thing.
One of the biggest challenges with computer UIs is how you convey information to a user, and that goes especially for games where players often can't take much time to analyze complexity, and it gets boiled down into a light gem indicator. One of the things I really love about the Thief games is how intuitive they are because they're mostly relying on sight/sound senses, you can relate to how the guards/defenses are going to sense you because it's how you would detect someone. If you're noisy you know what will happen next, and the guards are extremely vocal in telling you their state.
Going beyond that simplicity to account for other factors you could technically improve the simulation with is where I'm not sure it makes it more fun. Ultimately a mission needs to be conquerable, how far can you go making it more challenging and leave space for the player to push through while remaining plausible. Silhouette, different areas of your body being lit/unlit, whether movement speed of a lit/partially lit person affects detection makes a difference, guards having long term memory and adapting to half of them - they all sound good but I'm not sure they'd actually be rewarding to players and the development studio that implemented them. How do you 'tell the story' of a guard that spots your shape, knows you're sneaking around acts accordingly to take you by surprise and ends your game.
Similar with armor systems in a lot of games, we can probably simulate a lot of coverage/protection and the impact on mobility, that characters ability to fight with various weaponry because of what they wear, injuries, and so on, but for most games it gets abstracted into categories or points. Even if computation challenges of physically simulating that were overcome for dozens of characters in a fight, how do you convey all the consequences to the player to suggest how they can change things.
Something I've noticed as a general trend is that tech news has seemed to breed an optimistic fandom, that technology for the sake of technology must be good. It's exciting and dramatic, it's science fiction becoming reality. Concerns about needing to adapt around it are diminished even when it could be devastating (losing their job) to those involved, and it's unlikely much assistance will be given to "just" retrain.
I wonder where the 'extents' of the game product/service you buy can be defined. I could foresee a game client/server/toolkit like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights being released but as a barebones legally compliant framework that lets you play. Then on the other side of the line they have an optional online service that provides a scenario to play in (running the same server the public has), if that service goes away the game still works, just as buying a load of D&D kits doesn't give you a DM to run games in perpetuity. As another example, there's a lot of servers for games like Counter-strike where the experience and how it runs the gameplay is modded server-side only.
The "files and folders" hierarchical tree model for a file system is one where I wonder about the limits or effectiveness of the skeuomorphism approach to convey such a concept. If you're coming from a place where information was generally held and organized on paper, it _should_ be natural that you can group files within a container like a folder, and the kind of folder the iconography showed should be able to contain sub-folders.
While many did pick up on the idea, where were the shortcomings? Were the early graphics not enough to build the mental link. Was it the common grid view of icons. Was it the icon being an abstract thing you needed to open to see the contents instead of looking at it directly (as previews on the icon which came later), was it things opening in separate windows. It's not as though other more visually 'rich' methods to show a file system such as 3D or animated took off.
There's also the modern version that gets brought up occasionally where people who are using devices with mobile instead of desktop OSes apparently don't know how to work with file systems to manage data, and presumably they'd have even less exposure to the physical paper concept that inspired it.
Something that has been largely forgotten about is that it used to be routine to see pictures of smoggy Chinese and Asian cities, this was a problem for them that they solved. I can't help thinking we can't get this kind of preventative action on any large scale, we need to have severe issues first and that's not accounting for longer term/cumulative effects.
The other recurring theme is a mantra along the lines of "ends justify the means" when it comes to building data centers and all the consequences of that in the present, for some promise that AI will somehow have a net benefit to all eventually while hand-waving the details.
I think one precursor could have been EA's debacle with Sim City in 2013, when they apparently had a huge wave of disappointed customers doing chargebacks. I'm not aware of any public statement/evidence of this, but it really wouldn't surprise me if their payment processor leaned on them to provide a better means of accomplishing that, and it gave them a way to portray their store as customer friendly.
Whether or not many people would want to do that upgrade/migration is another question, but similar to you I doubt the number was high.