professional 3d apps like xsi need screens with a certain resolution, otherwise some buttons are cut off, yes there is a laptop mode that limits the application's height, but it's no fun.

one thing i would remember you of, we are approaching the decade of low-energy consuming, small, handy, styled devices, netbooks, pdas, handhelds. the eeepc and the acer one have a 1024x600 res, (casual) games that start on 800x600 will already be off screen, as you need space for the taskbar, the window decoration and the borders! tablet handhelds like the archos 7 series support only 800x600 natively, it can't run win games, but this might be important for web designers. dunno if it scales though, like the iPhone/iPodTouch.

so know your target customers and their devices. it would be unreasonable to design far cry 2 for 640x480, and also unreasonable to make a 2d chess for 1280x1024 only.

I'm using 1152x864.

I think you shouldn't turn things around... People that want to play Far Cry 2, should simply have a PC that can run that game. Same goes for 2D chess. If 1280x1024 is the only resolution supported, then people shouldn't even bother trying on a eeePC.

You know, we the consumers just have to accept things like this. I'm not ever going to play Crysis on my mobile phone, even though surely it would be very cool... it just won't be possible.

Cheers

Steam only checks ingame resolutions, most modern games do not even support 800x600 resolutions anymore, so people playing older games in the lower resolutions will inevitably be an incredibly small part of all Steam users.

Cheers

But you might have wanted to play the chess game - but unfortuantely can't because of the resolution.
That's the point.

As I wrote I used the 800x600 monitor for 8 years. In this time I was angry at programs like "Nvidia Meloldy" which only support a 1024x768 window. Every time I wanted to use the program I had to change my screen resolution. Very annoying.

I'm running on 1680x1050 on my primary monitor and 1280x1024 on my secondary.

I think it's just not a good thing to force limitations on your customers.

My opinion is to keep the 800 x 600.

I think the casual games should definitely still have this option available, because a lot of people still have a computer from ages ago, and wont buy a new one when theirs works fine.

But again, that's primarily for the casual games crowd.

The Steam ratings are from a base of game players... and it's obvious they will have higher end equipment to run games with, so for this particular matter, their poll is worthless.

I think Casual games should still have 800 x 600 resolution, but games who count on graphics as their only draw probaby won't want this.

I wonder though, how much work is it to keep/add this resolution to the options? To me it's really a non point. The player should be able to decide for themselves.

Wrong or right, i'm not going to lose a single customer because I just felt like removing a screen resolution option. There's still people using that resolution, and so I won't deny them. That would be bad customer relations.

In my opinion, this thread could have been answered simply with a response of:

"Not many people use this, but since some people do, there's no reason to remove this option because it's pointless to do so"

- Jason

Actually, depending on the game it can prove to be a real hassle implementing every possible resolution out there.

Really, adding scripts to automatically adjust panels is one thing, making it all look (and work) good at both 640x480 and 1280x1024 is something else!

I think it's a very acceptable argument to drop features if not many people use it anymore. It happens all the time and makes sure things move forward,

Cheers

Concerning a website the first thing to check is: Do I need 1024x768 at all?

It's a lot more space to fill, and if you don't have the content - why even bother?