Games have always suffered the most from back-compat, usually because they were the ones most prone to using hacks to speed things up. Remember how many things stopped working during the XP migration, because they expected the OS to get out of their way, like 9x did?
FWIW, there are some counterexamples. There is a turn-based strategy game (think Master of Magic meets H&MM) called Age of Wonders, that originally shipped in 1999, targeting Win95/98 and WinNT 4.0 - a rare case, that, most games from that era didn't even bother with NT. I still play it regularly, and the amazing part is how it not just works on Win10 machines today, but works amazingly well. For example, it can handle pretty much any random resolution (including tablets in portrait mode and other weird corner cases), and it actually scales its UI up and down accordingly.
The most interesting part is that it does do things that were normal back then but which are no-no now, like putting savegames directly into its install folder, or saving settings under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. But because they did them in a straighforward, non-hackish way, things like Vista's and later registry and FS redirection all work great, and the game doesn't even notice it at all.
I bet it could be easily packaged into the Store, if they wanted to.
> targeting Win95/98 and WinNT 4.0 - a rare case, that, most games from that era didn't even bother with NT. I still play it regularly, and the amazing part is how it not just works on Win10 machines today, but works amazingly well
These two things are not unrelated. Windows from 2k onwards has been based on the NT line (I remember Windows 7 is internally NT 6.1, I imagine 10 is similar).
FWIW, there are some counterexamples. There is a turn-based strategy game (think Master of Magic meets H&MM) called Age of Wonders, that originally shipped in 1999, targeting Win95/98 and WinNT 4.0 - a rare case, that, most games from that era didn't even bother with NT. I still play it regularly, and the amazing part is how it not just works on Win10 machines today, but works amazingly well. For example, it can handle pretty much any random resolution (including tablets in portrait mode and other weird corner cases), and it actually scales its UI up and down accordingly.
The most interesting part is that it does do things that were normal back then but which are no-no now, like putting savegames directly into its install folder, or saving settings under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. But because they did them in a straighforward, non-hackish way, things like Vista's and later registry and FS redirection all work great, and the game doesn't even notice it at all.
I bet it could be easily packaged into the Store, if they wanted to.