At the end of March 2023, representatives of Valve officially announced that in the near future they would completely abandon support for the Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 operating systems – starting from January 1, 2024, the Steam platform will not run on outdated OSes. And, unfortunately for some gamers, the company kept its word – as of yesterday, it will no longer be possible to launch the Steam digital platform on the above operating systems. Valve noted that gamers need to either update their operating system or, apparently, give up the ability to run games from their library.
And although Valve notes that as of December 2023, there were less than a percent (0.89%) of gamers on Steam with Windows 7, 8 and 8.1, in fact this is still a decent audience. After all, if Steam has an average of 10 million active gamers, then up to 100 thousand players played on outdated systems, whose access to their entertainment has now been blocked. Although, of course, the matter is not only in the low percentage of players – Valve notes that some key functions of the platform are based on built-in Google Chrome, the required version of which is no longer supported on older OSes, and security patches for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 are already expected no need to.
Valve recommends that gamers upgrade their operating system to at least Windows 10 – currently, more than half of the platform’s gamers run Steam with this OS (53.45%), so the developer will definitely not be able to abandon the “ten” in the near future. It is noteworthy that fewer players still play on Windows 11 than on the older version – only 41.95% of the total audience of active users. But the abandonment of old operating systems still cannot be called an unpleasant surprise – Valve warned gamers in advance, so they had as much as 9 months to solve the problem.