Blizzard to Cease Support for Certain Operating Systems in October

Blizzard entertainment have always been good at supporting lower end systems. They have infact gone to great lengths to ensure that most of their products, particularly World of Warcraft could continue to run on practically redundent technology. There does come a point, however, where a line must be drawn and as such Blizzard have announced that in October, they will cease support for certain operating systems.

Why are Blizzard doing this?

There does come a point where the cost outweighs the reward. In instances where Blizzard may have to pay programmers to convert software to run on older systems, those people could (and probably should) be working on more relevent projects. Blizzard do have a lot on at the moment, with Starcraft Remastered, Warcraft 3 Remastered, Diablo 2 remastered, constant work to Overwatch and not of course forgetting World of Warcraft. It’s therefore entirely understandable why they might want to cut back where possible.

So what are Blizzard discontinuing support for?

According to their own official website, support will be ended for Windows XP and Windows Vista.

In a statement, Blizzard has said: “Starting in October of this year, we will begin the process of ending support for Windows XP and Windows Vista. In World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. 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.”

Blizzard went on to add: “However, there have been three major Windows releases since Vista. At this point, the vast majority of our audience has upgraded to one of the newer versions. The games will not run on these older operating systems once they are no longer supported. 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. We will post further notices as we get closer to making the change for each game.”

Is this change a bad idea?

No, not really. Based on recent data Windows Vista and XP only represents circa 7.5% of the total market share. Of that, they are likely in use on older systems. Therefore they would very likely be entirely unsuitable for gaming any way. Another nail is driven into the Windows XP coffin.