(I wasn't sure if this belonged here or the lounge)
Hello, I am not new to development by any means but I have been thinking more and more seriously about hiring an artist to take my game development to the next level; ie going indie, as art is always what holds me back.
That being said the more I think about it the more I realize I have a fear about releasing a game for the PC because of all the different hardware configurations etc. Is this fear something to genuinely be concerned about? I mean have any of you who have published games for the PC really had any major problems related to different hardware configurations? I can only image you have because of the wide range of hardware.
So many questions come to mind when I think about this;
How did you deal with it?
How do you test for something like that? - surely you can't buy every rig
Maybe I am just lacking an understanding here, and this problem really isn't that big of an issue. But I do hear concerns along the same lines for Android development because of all of the different hardware configurations and again this is a market I've been thinking about developing for.
In my portfolio I have given away games that I have built while learning (all windows only at this time sorry), but I have never heard of any problems from all of the people that have downloaded them, so this makes me think that maybe this is a non-issue...but then again maybe people are just lazy and don't bother to report problems. Again though, everything I have released that ran XNA though I also made sure to use the Reach profile since I wasn't using Shaders etc so I misewell target lower end rigs.
So is the answer really, know what your games requirements are and only support hardware that falls into that category? It cannot be that simple.
I would love to hear from people, especially some that have released games.
Thanks for your time