Microsoft makes it easier to port DirectX 12 games to Windows 7

Earlier this year, we were very surprised to see that Microsoft helped Blizzard to launch a DirectX 12 version of World of Warcraft for Windows 7. DirectX 12 was not supposed to be available for Windows 7 and with the latter heading into retirement, it's very odd to see the operating system gain a new feature.

Now ExtremeTech reports Microsoft has now made DirectX 12 more accessible to developers who want to implement it on Windows 7.

The reason for this allowance? Probably China. World of Warcraft has always had a huge Chinese following, and Blizzard’s decision to add DX12 support to WoW was a significant step for both the developer and the API. Now, Microsoft has announced that it’s expanding this program. In a short blog post pointing an array of API documents, Microsoft notes:

We have received warm welcome from the gaming community, and we continued to work with several game studios to further evaluate this work. To better support game developers at larger scales, we are publishing the following resources to allow game developers to run their DirectX 12 games on Windows 7.

I'm not sure what the thought process here is, considering Windows 7 will cease to receive security updates on January 14, 2020. Microsoft wants to move as many people as possible to Windows 10 so it's weird that they're doing this move.