Microsoft ended its own official support for Windows XP in 2014. It followed suit with Windows Vista three years later. Which is why I’m surprised that only now is League of Legends developer Riot Games bringing an end to its MOBA’s support of the now-antiquated operating system.
In an announcement last week, the developer revealed that as of May 2019, “League of Legends is going to stop supporting Windows XP and Windows Vista.” The statement mentions that Microsoft no longer supports either operating system with security updates, making it “harder every day for us to maintain a secure League of Legends experience,” for a very small number of players.
According to Riot, fewer than one percent of players are still using XP, and Vista is even less popular among its player base. That’s not an insignificant number, however – if we assume that the most recently-reported player counts are accurate, as many as 800,000 League of Legends players may be using XP alone, with Vista likely pushing that number into seven figures.
Riot says that patch 9.9 will be the last one to support the operating systems. That patch is due at the end of April, so by the time patch 9.10 arrives in mid-May, affected players will need to have upgraded to Windows 7, 8, or 10, which Riot will be supporting for the forseeable future.
League’s developers aren’t the only ones dropping their support for the operating systems. Valve recently announced that, starting in January, Steam will no longer run on those versions of Windows.
If you’re running an operating system suited to the modern day and fancy keeping up to date with Riot’s MOBA, check out the League of Legends patch 9.1 notes. They’re pretty involved, with some major changes to Sejuani and Ornn, and balance tweaks for much of the rest of the roster.
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