Those of you still using Windows 7 and 8 that avidly play Steam games might want to consider finally upgrading.Almost two years after Microsoft itself abandoned Windows 7 and 8: Steam’s most recent client update is the first to not work on the old OSes, more than 11 months after Valve announced it would stop supporting them.
“This version of the Steam client will no longer run on Windows 7 or Windows 8,” reads the accompanying documentation of the November 5 Steam client update. “Users on these OS versions will not automatically update to this new version of the Steam client.”
Back in January, Valve announced that official support for Windows 7 and 8 had officially ended, meaning Steam Support would not be able to offer any technical support for issues users might be facing on those operating systems.
“We expect the Steam client and games on these older operating systems to continue running for some time without updates after January 1st, 2024,” Valve wrote on the Steam support website at the time, “but we are unable to guarantee continued functionality after that date.” According to Valve, the embedded version of Google Chrome required for core functions of the Steam client was the impetus for the move—it just doesn’t support older versions of Windows anymore.
As of October’s Steam hardware survey, only .28% of users were still on Windows 7, while there were no reported users at all on Windows 8. It’s surprising that Valve took this long to make the call to end support.