Blizzard won’t support old operating systems from October

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In October this year, Blizzard will begin to cease support for Windows XP and Vista for their games. If you’re using one of the old operating systems, you’ll need to upgrade if you want to play World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. 

As Blizzard point out in the announcement, Microsoft themselves stopped supporting the operating systems by 2012, though a high playerbase using them meant Blizzard kept on supporting them in their games. 

That audience has significantly dropped off since, with the release of Microsoft’s more modern operating systems, so Blizzard feel like it’s time to retire that support. 

“The games will not run on these older operating systems once they are no longer supported, so we encourage any players who are still using one of the older OSes to upgrade to a newer version,” Blizzard say. “We’ll be rolling out this change on a staggered schedule, and will post further notices as we get closer to making the change for each game.”

At least you’ve got plenty of notice, then. 

Replies • 271

Easy way to lose much more players...

If i would play any game of blizzard, i would stop it, if i have to install "NSA"dows (windows) 10. Microsoft supports win7 until 2020, so theres no pressure why i have to use win10. In my opinion windows 7 is the best os from microsoft.


Canned Goods

There is no reason for Blizzard to continue to support the old OS that Microsoft stopped supporting. I'm surprised that there are still gamers using XP or Vista.


Interstellar
ProjectTinCan said:

There is no reason for Blizzard to continue to support the old OS that Microsoft stopped supporting. I'm surprised that there are still gamers using XP or Vista.

Agree. Rather it's a surprise that Blizzard actually supported XP and Vista for this long, even after MS ceased supporting.



Galactic

At some point having support of all these older systems is too much of a burden and affects the sustainability of a project. I think this is a good move by blizz, however unfortunate for those who have systems with those OSes installed.


Planetary

I think everybody should decide which OS she/he uses. Even if I use Win10, I think it´s a wrong move not to Support the other OS.



Galactic

Windows XP and Vista came out about 15 and 10 years ago, respectively. I'm surprised Blizzard supported them for so long.