Over a year ago (story) We’ve been killing PC gaming was the headline accompanying announcement of Microsoft's plans on redressing its neglect of the PC gaming sector with a commitment to its revival, describing an 18-month drive to build a Games for Windows program. Mysterious at first (story), it soon became evident that a significant part of this initiative would be centered around Windows Vista, as it was announced that Halo 2 for the PC will be a Vista exclusive (story) (presumably not due to Vista's "better file management" (story)). Subsequent speculation that DirectX 10 will be a Vista exclusive was confirmed (story), leading some to question whether the real plan was to revive PC gaming with Vista or to inspire Vista sales by leveraging PC gaming. If entertaining such thoughts was making you feel like a cynic, take comfort that these feelings are echoed by those in the know, such as WildTangent's Alex St. John (story), the original DirectX evangelist, and id Software's John Carmack (story), who have each recently raised their own concerns about this. St. John's criticism actually centers around the difficulties for developers large and small with Vista's integral Games Explorer and its security functions, while Carmack confirms the emperor wears no clothing in verifying that the Vista exclusivity of DirectX 10 is indeed just a contrivance to force gamers to upgrade:

It’s a tough thing for Microsoft, where, essentially, Windows XP was a just fine operating system. Before that, there were horrible problems with Windows. But once they got there, it did everything an operating system is supposed to do. Nothing is going to help a new game by going to a new operating system. There were some clear wins going from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games, but there really aren’t any for Vista. They’re artificially doing that by tying DX10 so close it, which is really nothing about the OS. It’s a hardware-interface spec. It’s an artificial thing that they’re doing there. They’re really grasping at straws for reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run XP for a great many more years without having a problem with it.