Blizzard Ending Support For Windows XP & Vista

For all of the World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm players out there still clinging on to their old operating systems, it looks like you may be due for an upgrade. Blizzard has confirmed on Battle.net forums that they will no longer be supporting the Windows XP and Windows Vistas OS. Here’s what they had to say:

Starting later 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. 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.

While this news most likely doesn’t affect many PC gamers, there still are some out there who are avoiding the OS switch. Looks like Blizzard just forced their hands.