Blizzard To Stop Support Of Windows XP And Vista For WOW, Hearthstone, And More

There are still a lot of people in the world using both Windows XP and Windows Vista as the operating systems of their computers. Many of these users are playing on Blizzard’s many intellectual properties such as World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, and the card game Hearthstone. The company recently announced that soon, they will no longer be able to do this.

Several tech companies have been announcing that they would stop supporting both XP and Vista with their various platforms for some time now, which gave these users plenty of time to upgrade. Together, they make up only a very small amount of players on all of Blizzard’s titles, Ars Technica reports. However, they do still exist.

So when Blizzard announced via blog post that these players would no longer get the full support from the company as they have enjoyed so far, there will be those whose gaming experience will be inconvenienced. Aside from the titles mentioned before, Starcraft II and Heroes of the Storm players will also need to upgrade soon if they want to keep playing with optimum support.

“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,” the post reads. “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.”

For those wondering why their OS version would even matter to play these games, it has a lot to do with the online requirements that are tied to the official versions of these games. Those playing on legitimate copies of any of these titles will simply need to accept these changes or stop playing altogether.