Blizzard is ending support for Windows XP And Vista for it’s games starting October 2017. The games like World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm will no longer run on these older operating systems.
Blizzard’s games have a reputation of running well on low-spec PCs, but the operating system is one area XP users will have to upgrade to continue playing these games.
The Overwatch didn’t have XP or Vista support, and the upcoming StarCraft Remastered won’t either. Blizzard’s games will now only support Windows 7/8.1 and Windows 10.
Official Post,
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. 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.
The games will not run on these older operating systems once they are no longer supported, 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.
Windows XP was released in 2001 and about 7% of desktop systems are still running the OS.
