A post to the official Blizzard forums reveals that World of Warcraft will no longer be supported on Macintosh computers equipped with PowerPC processors, the change occurring in an upcoming patch scheduled for release before the debut of WoW Cataclysm.

“Shortly before the release of Cataclysm a patch will be released in which PowerPC processor based Macs will no longer be supported,”Blizzard poster, Lucytr writes.

“This update indicates the removal of PowerPC support from World of Warcraft,” Lucytr clarifies.

“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,” the poster notes.

Disappointed  by the news, forum user Resfilas replied: “Can you explain the reason for this? This seems a bit eccentric to me.”

Another Blizzard Poster, S4d1k, stepped in to provide more clarification as to why the game development studio needs to stop developing with PPC in mind.

“PPC stop[ped] receiving any updates at all with the death of Leopard a year ago,” S4d1k writes.

“In reality, Apple has been focusing on Intel Macs since the end of 2005,” the Blizzard poster points out.

“So since 5 years, PPC systems has received very few bug fixes,” he outlines. “It is now too hard to deal with all the bugs and the lack of features to support the few PPC users that we have left,” S4d1k concludes.

Undoubtedly many will be affected by the move. Readers are encouraged to share their thoughts using our brand new commenting system.

(Softpedia note)
However, there’s one particular aspect to take into consideration - and it’s likely the most logical explanation for Blizzard’s move.

The PowerPC architecture is, first of all, old. Five year old Macs are already struggling to handle the latest updates from Blizzard.

And, because gaming studios always focus on leveraging new technologies to provide the best experience possible, you can understand why Blizzard’s World of Warcraft was bound to stop working on old hardware one of these days.