In October this year, Blizzard will begin to cease support for Windows XP and Vista for their games. If you’re using one of the old operating systems, you’ll need to upgrade if you want to play World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm.
If you’re going all-out on the upgrade, check out our list of the best CPUs.
As Blizzard point out in the announcement, Microsoft themselves stopped supporting the operating systems by 2012, though a high playerbase using them meant Blizzard kept on supporting them in their games.
That audience has significantly dropped off since, with the release of Microsoft’s more modern operating systems, so Blizzard feel like it’s time to retire that support.
“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,” Blizzard say. “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.”
At least you’ve got plenty of notice, then.