Do you play World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and/or Heroes of the Storm on your Windows PC? If you're still running Windows XP or Windows Vista, you ought to think about upgrading soon. Because you won't be able to play those games on your current setup for much longer.
Blizzard will begin the process of ending support for Windows XP and Windows Vista on the aforementioned games later this year.
"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," Community Manager Ornyx wrote on battle.net.
Since the release of Windows 7, 8, and Windows 10, however, "the vast majority of our audience has upgraded to one of the newer versions," Ornyx wrote.
Related
- 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows 1010 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows 10
Ornyx said Blizzard will be rolling out the change on a "staggered schedule." The company promised to inform users when it gets closer to making the change for each game. After this change rolls out, you will no longer be able to play World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm on XP or Vista.
"We encourage any players who are still using one of the older OSes to upgrade to a newer version," Ornyx wrote.
Those still on XP or Vista may also soon encounter some issues with Gmail. Google earlier this month started showing a banner at the top of Gmail for users who are still on Chrome version 53 and below encouraging them to upgrade. Gmail will continue to function on Chrome 53 and below through the end of the year, but as early as December, those who don't upgrade their browser may start to be redirected to the basic HTML version of Gmail. The change is most likely to affect XP and Vista users since Google stopped supporting those outdated operating systems after Chrome 49.