Steam to suspend Windows 7 and 8 support in 2024
Valve has announced that Steam would stop supporting Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 as of January 1, 2024. “After that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows. In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of Windows,” the company stated.
Steam is the leading digital store and platform for PC games, making it almost essential to have for anyone playing on their computer. Since it receives more and more updates and features as time goes by, it relies on newer technologies to run properly, making it necessary for users to run modern operating systems.
“The newest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows. In addition, future versions of Steam will require Windows feature and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above,” Valve explained.
Previously, users could still download and play games through Steam even after the platform dropped its support for older versions of Windows, even though features like the store and the friend list didn’t work anymore. This was possible due to the login window and the Small Mode of the Steam library not running on Chromium.
However, even the login window for Steam is now based on Chromium, making it impossible to even access the client from an old OS not supported by it.
Microsoft itself ended active support for those versions of Windows in January 2023, so they are not receiving any more security updates – thus, switching to a modern edition is recommended in any case. In fact, most people using Steam have already done so anyway: Valve’s latest hardware survey revealed that only around 2% of people on the platform still used Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1.
Epic Games has dropped the support for these OS versions for Fortnite earlier this year as well, recommending players on Windows 7 and Windows 8 to use a cloud gaming service instead – their sun is truly setting.
