jamie_marchant wrote:What is the advantage of dropping support for older Visual Studios?
Microsoft has been slowly increasing the standards-compliance of their compiler, but they have not been back-porting all of these updates to the older compilers. This means better, cleaner code that is easier to maintain and easier to fix existing features as well as add new ones. Often this can now be done using C++ standard library code instead of third-party libraries, which makes building and maintaining the engine easier as well for new developers.
Another benefit of being able to use these C++ features is parity with compilers available on Linux and OSX, which is another step toward someday being able to target those platforms natively.
We've always made sure that we support freely-available compilers, and this is still true.
Visual Studio 2013 Express is only a download away (and has been for some time, along with our notifications that this change was coming).