What hardware that moms that play Tetris online are using?

The folks at Three Rings appear to be open about they data, releasing even financial information, so maybe they would not mind to share the hardware configuration of Puzzle Pirates users.

You could argue that they were chasing the hardcore market, but an MMO needs to target a larger group if it wants to break even, or it needs to be made very cheaply with a small team.

what is the spec of the machine that would cover 90 percent or more of the audience – they are impressively unimpressive.

Back in the early 90′s, developers would assume that computers only lasted 3 years. They could do this because (a) people had a reason to upgrade, and (b) the market was growing so quickly that there were no old computers around, and (c) there notebook and mininotebook categories were very small compared to desktops.

A PC lifepsan now seems to be 8-ish years.

The trick for game developers now is to create a game that runs on an 8 year-old computer, while still delivering a noticably better experience (aka: better graphics, etc.) to people with the latest.

The big myth was that games drove PC purchases. Actually, games would accelerate a purchase by 6 months, or maybe a year, that we were going to make regardless. Now, with no compelling reason to upgrade, most people only replace computers when they mechanically fail.

What is real fun is to look at the “90th percentile” and “99th percentile computers” – what is the spec of the machine that would cover 90 percent or more of the audience – they are impressively unimpressive. And, if you are going to build for the mass PC market (which is much, much bigger than consoles), that is where you’ve got to aim.

How many of the dual core machines are really just hyper-threaded single-core machines?

I think you’ve got a point. I suspect that Unity counted hyperthreading as dual-core. Valve seems to notice the difference because they actually have more single core, fewer dual cores, and more quad-cores (59%/27%/4%) compared to unity’s single/dual/quad numbers (55%/44%/1%).

Which means, as a guestimate, the number of dual-core casuals is 15%-20%.

Moore’s Law is breaking. Not because the number of transistors per chip aren’t doubling every 18 months. But because people are buying smaller/cheaper computers… such as the iPhone or Eee PC.

These smaller/cheaper computers also have smaller screens, fewer pixels, smaller/no keyboard, and alternate IO. The Unity and Valve stats don’t reflect this info.