Friday, July 21st 2017
Blizzard to Discontinue Support for Windows XP, Vista
Blizzard, best known for their Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo series (who are also responsible for that phenomenon World of Warcraft), has recently announced they are going to cut back support for older Windows-based operating systems. Resource allocation is a real problem; the opportunity cost of having engineers working on ensuring that their most recent updates and recent remasters aren't breaking support for older operating systems always comes at the cost of work on newer OSes.
As such, in a blog post on their forums, Blizzard has announced that 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." They went on to explain this decision, in that "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." And if you're thinking that this isn't true end of life for these systems when it comes to Blizzard game support, think again: "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."
Source:
Blizzard @ Battle.net Forums
As such, in a blog post on their forums, Blizzard has announced that 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." They went on to explain this decision, in that "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." And if you're thinking that this isn't true end of life for these systems when it comes to Blizzard game support, think again: "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."
25 Comments on Blizzard to Discontinue Support for Windows XP, Vista
Thus you can easily call it phenomenon.
Old pc can run win 10 just fine. My old x58 system runs it fine and have no problems with it. X58 is released 9 years a go, so if your pc cant run win 10 you must have a very old system then.
Come on people xp is out dated and a major securety risk. Its time to upgrade. If you still run xp you are nuts :kookoo:
Maybe not same popularity, but hey.. it runs after 20 years. Not sure WoW will have 20 yrs birthday. I would certainly prefer if it did not.
IMHO, current best MMO is TESO.
First time I tried it, well to simply say it … I was amazed.
It was light years ahead of it competition, and felt like a game you wouldn’t actually mind paying for each month.
Second time, wasn’t impressed so much.
It was still stuck on DX9, and looked like shit in comparison to the newer games.
The community wasn’t much better, or maybe I just picked a bad server.
It wasn’t really offering much in comparison to what you could get somewhere else.Well it might seem like a scummy move, but you have to also consider all the additional work it has to go in the game for it to support all the legacy operating systems. Plus all the additional security issues, and you are also hindered by the lack of Direct X support. Without XP/Vista they can finally completely drop the old DX9 engine, and focus more on DX11/DX12. Seeing as there are no plans for WOW2, they do need to focus on making the game look as fresh as they can.
As for WoWs influence: I would argue it's on the top spot. UO has ran for longer, but WoW is the bar for MMORPGs and has been for more than a decade. Being the bar to beat makes you influental as others have to look at what works for you and do those thing better.
Plus, it is not economical to catter the absolute minority by now. I am pretty sure Blizzard want's to get rid of the legacy code, especially for the graphics (XP was what, DX7.0 originally?) and just move everything over to DX11.
What's more, will you also argue that Blizzard is bad because they have raised system requirements for WoW? It used to run on max on Pentium 4 back in 2004, yet the minimum required CPU has been a dual core and DX10 capable GPU at least since the WoD. Are they guilty that WoW is not supposed to be run on single core systems anymore? Or what about removing Windows 98 compatibility? ME? 2000?
P.S.
Pretty sure they also don't want to deal with stolen account info because someone run on XP, which got some keylogger. Chances of getting one increases greatly if the OS is unsupported by it's creators.