Blizzard games have announced that World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 amongst others will all stop working on computers running Windows XP or Vista by the end of this year.
Older games will continue to work on both systems but given that XP and Vista are 15 and 10 years old respectively and that Microsoft stopped supporting both years ago, Blizzard believes that now is the time to cut them loose.
After announcing the news last Friday, Blizzard posted on their website:
“Microsoft ceased mainstream support for these versions of Windows in 2009 and 2012, respectively, but since a decent portion of our audience was still using them at the time, we continued supporting them. However, there have been three major Windows releases since Vista, and at this point, the vast majority of our audience has upgraded to one of the newer versions.
“After these older operating systems are no longer supported, the games will not run on them, so we encourage any players who are still using one of the older OSes to upgrade to a newer version. 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.”
Throughout the year Blizzard will introduce new patches that will stop the games from working on systems running XP and Vista. They have yet to give specific dates for these updates.
So while gamers may feel frustrated that they will have to fork out X amount of money for a new OS, Blizzard should be applauded for supporting the XP and Vista for years beyond what Microsoft did.
