Blizzard Games ending support for Windows XP and Vista at the start of October 2017
We have some bad news for those playing Blizzard Entertainment titles on old operating systems, as the studio has reported today that several of their games will no longer work on Windows XP and Vista.
In an official post, Blizzard announced that from October this year it will remove support for Windows XP and Vista in 5 of its most important games, 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,” the studio explained. “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.”
So, the only way to continue enjoying these titles is to upgrade your operating system to one of the newer versions of Windows, such as Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10.
At the moment, Blizzard simply said that these changes will occur in a staggered way during the month of October, without so far giving a precise date. “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,” the statement noted.