As gamers, we all know the bell tolls for us at one time or another, but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.
Today, the death knell comes for a large number of Steam users as Valve no longer supports older operating systems like Windows 7, 8, or 8.1. As saddening as this news is for those of us who don’t upgrade every time a newer model or system comes out, Valve did inform everyone of this change last March.
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“As of January 1 2024, Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems,” the post stated. “After that date, existing Steam Client installations on these operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind including security updates. Steam Support will be unable to offer users technical support for issues related to the old operating systems, and Steam will be unable to guarantee continued functionality of Steam on the unsupported operating system versions.”
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Steam went on to explain that this was necessary due to “core features” of the platform relying on an “embedded version of Google Chrome”. The post ended with the site “strongly” advising its users to upgrade to a newer operating system as soon as they’re able, emphasis on the soon.
However, while Steam no longer supports these older Microsoft systems, that isn’t to say you’ll suddenly be unable to use its services. As Valve also addressed in its statement, “We expect the Steam client and games on these older operating systems to continue running for some time without updates after January 1st, 2024. Still, it did make a point adding that it’s “unable to guarantee continued functionality” after 1 Jan.
For now, you might get away on borrowed time, but it’ll eventually run out, meaning an upgrade is imminent for all who want to keep playing Steam. As we all know, Windows upgrades are the stuff of nightmares, so we wish you all the best of luck during this trying transitional period.