Blizzard Ending Support For Windows XP And Vista In All Of Its Modern Games

It's the end of an era for Blizzard Entertainment—literally. The company announced at the end of last week that it would be ending support for Windows XP and Vista "later this year." The announcement pertains to all of Blizzard's modern games, including Diablo III, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft II, and World of Warcraft.

The full announcement is as follows.

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.