On August 28, 2019, we will be ending support for Roblox on Windows XP and Vista. This means that anyone running these operating systems will need to upgrade to Windows 7 or above to continue playing.
Why is this happening?
These operating systems are outdated and unsupported by Microsoft, which means they no longer receive security patches. Furthermore, it’s becoming more and more difficult to support these operating systems ourselves, and by ending compatibility for XP and Vista we can devote more resources to improving the platform for the rest of our players and developers.
Who will be affected?
The vast majority of our Windows players are on Windows 7 or above and will be unaffected by this change. Windows XP and Vista computers make up only a very small percentage of users worldwide. Still, we hope that the users that we do have using these operating systems will consider upgrading to a later version.
When will this happen?
Windows XP and Vista users will begin receiving daily warnings on August 14. Starting August 28, they will no longer be able to launch Roblox.
What about Roblox Studio?
Roblox Studio already requires Windows 7 or above, so there will be no change for Studio users.
What if I have questions or concerns?
If you have any questions, post them here and we’ll do our best to answer them.
44 posts were merged out for being off-topic / insignificant contributions
Please be mindful of our rules before posting on this topic (liking instead of replying, repeating what others have already said, staying on topic, etc.)
Replies should be questions regarding this upcoming update to Roblox.
Interesting to know that these operating systems are still supported at the time. Just out of curiosity, how much of the playerbase today uses XP/Vista?
We have no current plans to end support for Windows 7. It’s still very popular, and so unofficially, I would say it’s not likely to happen any time soon. We even have a rendering engineer who refuses to upgrade to Windows 10…
They stopped support for Studio but allowed people to still play on those machines due to people from places like the Philippines that usually only had access to machines with XP/Vista installed.
Speaking of which, will that harm the playerbase there at all? I remember @Wsly stating he had Philippines fans that would regularly tweet him photos of them playing that still had XP. I also have to agree with his comment regarding the removal of support of Windows XP in particular would slow/prevent the growth in the Asian market and similar regions.
That’s an interesting comment. How does this disproportionately affect certain communities/regions? Or does it at all? Those statistics would be interesting to see. I bet they’ve already looked into this and taken those things into consideration, but it’s still potentially a very real issue when Roblox is trying to expand to become a more global platform. I remember when they cut support for older versions of MacOS and a similar effect happened.
Gonna have to bust out my Dell Latitude D360 with XP on it for one last hoorah on the 28th it sounds like decided to do it today after getting the opportunity to repost this reply.
In all seriousness though, its equally shocking that this is just now happening. A lot of modern programs have already moved on to bigger and better things with more optimized operating systems and I hope to see Roblox do the same.
I also want to point out that I had to repost this reply because it somehow got pillaged with the rest of the moot replies that were in this thread. It’s good to see the Dev Rel team take some action to further enhance the discussion, I suppose, but it’d be nice to not see relevant replies get binned in the process as well.
Since the end of Windows XP/Vista support allows the upgrade to newer SDKs/toolchains, is there anything in mind that this jump to newer software opens up for the future? Better performance, new features, etc.?
The operating system has officially been abandoned by Windows for years. They have stated multiple times that its on the user to upgrade their hardware accordingly.
Its easy to feel bad for the small playerbase still using XP (especially in some countries where it’s still the premier operating system) but the writing has been on the wall here for a long time. These players have been warned and if it’s that much of a deal for them to keep running XP in some way or fashion, I’d recommend buying some dedicated hardware to run it on the side whilst using a modern PC.
I think a lot of people are like this, I myself was one of them when Windows 10 first came out because I had various gripes about the OS. Most of them have been resolved, however.
Kinda like what I do. I have my main PC for most things, however I have an older PC which runs Windows XP for older games and nostalgia. I’m pretty okay with this setup.
It’s been years since I played Roblox on Windows XP. Good memories.
I must say this change will definitely be beneficial in the long run. The platform shouldn’t be held back by an extremely insignificant minority who have had the chance to upgrade for years now.
Also, a lot of people are complaining about how users from the Philippines (why this country specifically?) will no longer be able to play. Just because you have screenshots from players there doesn’t mean you should assume they all have 20-year-old OSes running on their computers. I promise that the Philippines community will continue to grow and thrive, and will ultimately feel the benefits of this update just like everyone else.
I feel like people will use that one app that tricks a program into thinking its Windows 7 or later, so players who are unable to upgrade to a newer OS, particularly those in the Philippines, according to some of the posts here, will still be able to play Roblox.
Personally, I’ve never liked the idea of forcing the end user to upgrade to a newer OS. They’re based on NT, which is why you can take a newer program and slap it onto an XP system and itll just work, assuming the developers didnt put artificial locks on it.
I’ll just get to the point: it doesn’t come as a surprise for me, XP was long dead, even if it was on Life Support for a while (you could unofficially get updates that were meant for Windows Embedded PosReady 2009 which was very similar to Windows XP through a registry modification, iirc), so it was on due time that it would happen.
On a personal note, I’m still rocking my old Dell Optiplex GX520 (with its full blown Pentium IV HT 3 GHz “Prescott”, AKA the very computer that I started playing ROBLOX on), it still works (and runs Windows 10 fine despite its age), I’ll miss booting Windows XP and going on Super Nostalgia Zone (yes) to play some resurected classics
But as goes the saying, “out with the old, and in with the new”, myself I dislike Windows 10 (the forced updates on the home version are a roadblock for me, I want granular control over updates, not a one-catches-all gotcha that always catches you off-guard, so I went for Windows 10 Pro that has at least some control on updates), if I had the choice, I would have stayed on Windows 7 but with Microsoft axing Windows 7’s updates, you cannot be sure of what tricks nefarious ill-willed people to target unsupported OSes.
@TheRings0fSaturn unfortunately that is how things are, Microsoft cannot eternally patch an OS forever, but forcing the customer is a necessary evil, old unsupported OSes, might have some vulnerabilities creeping by, and these could cause some varying degrees of damage.
