Blizzard has announced that it will stop support for PowerPC based Apple Mac systems for its heavily popular MMORPG game - World of Warcraft. The announcement was made a few hours ago in the Mac Technical Support Section of World of Warcraft forums. A patch would be released to nix the same before the third expansion pack - Cataclysm arrives. This might dishearten PowerPC based Mac owners.

Blizzard is apparently dropping support for older Macs stating that Apple itself has been focusing on Intel Macs since 2005. As per Blizzard Forum Staff S4d1k, "So since 5 years, PPC systems has received very few bug fixes. 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."

Of course here, the staff is pointing out important updates related to graphics, key system extensions and framework of the PowerPC Mac systems. At this moment, Apple releases only security updates for old PowerPC based Mac Systems and even the new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard won't run on PowerPC based Macs.

World of Warcraft is one of the heavily played MMORPG games that gets a major expansion packs every year. To cope with new technologies, game developers have to drop support for old and extinct hardware. We're sure that number of users who're addicted and true followers of the game would upgrade their machines. The patch, in the near future would be automatically applied for any user on PowerPC Mac running Burning Crusade or Wrath or Lich King.