World of Warcraft and Eschalon Dropping Support for PowerPC

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and Basilisk Games’ Eschalon series have very little in common, but both developers have just announced that they will soon be dropping support for Apple’s aging PowerPC architecture. From Blizzard’s announcement:

A little forewarning to those of you that play World of Warcraft on these systems;

Shortly before the release of Cataclysm, a patch will be released in which PowerPC processor based Macs will no longer be supported.

This update indicates the removal of PowerPC support from World of Warcraft.

Attempting to run the game after the update will bring up a message stating the hardware is no longer supported, and the game will not run.

And here is what Thomas and team had to say:

Supporting a discontinued piece of hardware is difficult.

Earlier we posted a question regarding whether or not we should continue to support the PowerPC Macintosh platform, and the overwhelming response from our customers so far has been that it is now okay to discontinue this support. Two years ago we asked the same question and the response was far different.

We asked this question because while we want to cater to as many platforms as possible, it is becoming impossible to compile our games on the PowerPC Mac due to lack of support from other software providers. Technology marches on and the sun has set on the Macintosh PowerPC architecture, at least for us.

And so, it is with no great sadness we officially drop PowerPC Mactinosh support from all future games, including future versions of Book I and Book II. Versions 1.05 of Book I and 1.04 of Book II will be the last that contain a Universal Binary application.

If you are one of the few Mac gamers who will be negatively affected by this decision, we sincerely apologize. And to the PowerPC processor that made the Mac what it is today, we salute you!