Valve announced that its Steam online game platform will officially drop support for the Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 platforms starting January 1st, 2024.
Once it reaches the end-of-support date, the Steam Client software will stop working on these out-of-support Windows versions, with Valve recommending users to upgrade to a more recent Windows version to continue playing their games via Steam.
“This change is required as core features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows,” Valve said.
“In addition, future versions of Steam will require Windows feature and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above.”
Valve also strongly encouraged users to upgrade their Windows 7/8/8.1 systems as soon as possible before support ends in January 2024 to secure them from malware or other malicious attacks targeting them if left exposed on the Internet.
“That malware can cause your PC, Steam and games to perform poorly or crash. That malware can also be used to steal the credentials for your Steam account or other services.”
Users running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 can still upgrade to Windows 10 for free using a digital license even though the company announced it would end this promotional offer on July 29, 2016.
Windows 7 extended security updates ended in January
Today’s announcement comes after Microsoft revealed on January 10th, 2023, that it stopped providing security updates and technical support for all Windows 7 editions (including Professional and Enterprise).
All editions of Windows 8.1, launched nine years ago in November 2013, have also reached EOS on the same day.
Currently, Windows 7 runs on over 5.39% of all Windows systems worldwide and Windows 8.1 is used by 1.15% of customers, both quickly losing market share since Microsoft’s January announcement, according to Statcounter GlobalStats.
Microsoft and Steam are not the only companies giving up on Windows 7 and 8, with a similar announcement by Google saying that Chrome version 110 would be dropping support for Windows 7/8.1 starting February 2023.
Other vendors dropped support for the two out-of-support operating systems before Microsoft announced they’d stop receiving security updates.
For instance, NVIDIA stopped providing Windows 7 and 8.1 drivers last year in October 2021.
The impact of this change will likely be minimal since only 0.10% of users are still using Windows 7 while 0.36% run Windows 8.1, according to the Steam February 2023 Hardware & Software survey.
