Steam Dropping Support For Windows 7, 8 Next Year
Steam's shortening its list of supported operating systems starting next year.
Valve, the company operating the digital game distributor, announced it's dropping support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 starting 1 January 2024.
"After that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows," wrote Steam in its announcement. "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 reason for this is that the latest version of the software uses an embedded version of Google's Chrome browser, which no longer supports the aforementioned operating systems since February. Valve also said future versions of Steam for Windows would also require OS updates that are only available for Windows 10 or later releases.
The change is not expected to affect a lot of Steam users, if Steam's Hardware & Software Survey for February 2023 is to be believed. According to the data, only 0.09% of users run Steam on Windows 7, while only 1.43% run it on the 64-bit version. Meanwhile, only 0.34% run Steam on Windows 8 64-bit. In contrast, 62.33% run the software on Windows 10, while 32.06% run it on Windows 11, the latest major version of Microsoft's operating system.
Valve's announcement shouldn't come as a surprise as Microsoft itself in January 2020 already announced it would end support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. The software giant is pushing those who are still running the aforementioned Windows versions to upgrade their systems to one that can run Windows 11.
Epic, one of Steam's primary competitors, similarly dropped Windows 7 and 8 support for its client, which is needed to play the popular battle royale Fortnite, earlier this month. The gaming giant said that users could either upgrade their systems to continue playing or use GeForce Now, Nvidia's cloud gaming service.
Valve announced Steam is dropping support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 starting 1 January 2024.
The reason for this is that the latest version of the software uses an embedded version of Google's Chrome browser, which no longer supports the aforementioned operating systems since February.
The change is not expected to affect a lot of Steam users, with only a small fraction of Steam users running the aforementioned operating systems, according to Valve's data.