Blizzard is dropping Windows XP/Vista support for WOW in October

We will be ending support for Windows XP and Windows Vista for several Blizzard games. For World of Warcraft, we’re ending support for these operating systems in October.

Microsoft ended mainstream support for these versions of Windows in 2009 and 2012, respectively, but since a segment of our audience was still using them at the time, we continued to support them. Now that there have been three major Windows releases since Vista’s release and a clear majority of our audience has upgraded to one of the newer versions of Windows, we are ready to make this change.

After this time, Windows XP and Vista will not be supported and World of Warcraft will not run on them. We encourage any players who are still using one of these older operating systems to upgrade to a newer version prior to this date to continue playing.

 

This is a very smart move from Blizzard, as maintaining support for older operating systems has gotten increasingly difficult as each of their games are updated. With such a small number of gamers using these operating systems, verifying that every new game expansion and update functions properly on them becomes almost a complete waste of effort.

 

  

The reason why Blizzard can safely drop support for these older operating systems is because there is almost nobody that currently using them, at least for gaming applications. Beyond that these OS’ also lack any security support from Microsoft, making these OS’ unsafe for even basic internet browsing. To say the least, anyone using these OS’ should consider upgrading to a new one, even if just for peace of mind. 

 

You can join the discussion on Blizzard’s plans to drop support for Windows XP and Vista from their games on the OC3D Forums.