In an announcement that I must admit comes as a massive surprise, Blizzard has just revealed that they will be ending support for Widows XP and Vista in October. Just to put things into perspective, Microsoft ceased public support for these versions of Windows all the way back in 2009 and 2012 respectively! So hats off to Blizzard, they kept their games compatible for way, way longer than was reasonably expected of them.

There aren't many details available right now, but if you're interested in Blizzard's reasoning behind this change you'll find the full announcement post right below. Have a look:

"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."

According to the most recent Steam Hardware & Software Survey the 32-bit version of Windows XP represents a 'massive' 0.76% of all PCs, while Windows Vista resides at an even lower, though much cooler 0.07%. As such, this change is thankfully going to affect a very small portion of the playerbase, a portion that should really consider investing into a slightly better PC. The exact schedule hasn't been revealed just yet, but you can expect to see further notices as each game gets closer to its transition period.