From January 2024, Valve will stop supporting Steam for Windows 7 and 8.1. However, a cursory glance at the Steam hardware review shows that not everything is so hopeless.
Valve, the company behind Steam and Counter-Strike, will stop supporting its store on Windows 7 and 8.1 starting in January 2024. This move, which may seem alarming, is actually partly due to recent Steam updates.
In a fairly transparent blog post, Valve states that this is due to Steam using a “built-in version of Google Chrome”. We assume that Steam now uses the Chromium backend to manage its store and in-app features.
Google itself “closed” Chrome support in Windows 7 and 8.1 in October 2022, while version 109 was the last one that worked on older operating systems. Google believes this is due to the fact that Microsoft has finally completed its extended 8.1 support, which ended in January of this year.
Less than 2% of Steam users use Windows 7 and 8.1.
However, the monthly Steam hardware review for February 2023 shows that less than 2% are Windows 7 and 8.1 users on Steam. Since most major games no longer support Windows 7 anyway, Valve’s removal of older operating systems was not an “if”, but a “when”.
Microsoft is currently preparing for the next two years to be the last for Windows 10 before they also introduce this into extended life support. In 2025, Windows 10 will no longer be supported, which will force people to disable the operating system and continue to receive security updates.
After the launch of Windows 11 in 2021, it was not well received when it turned out that older systems would not be supported. Due to the requirements, most of the PCs will hang on Windows 10 until that particular user is able to upgrade the hardware itself or bypass it with a community installation.
