Goodbye, Old OS: Steam Ends Support for Windows 7 and 8
On Monday, Steam officially ended support for its app on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. As a result, those who still use the gaming platform on these operating systems will no longer receive updates and the client may stop working. The decision was announced by the company in March 2023.
According to Steam’s own data, the end of support should impact few users. In the survey of users of the platform in November, adding up all these operating systems, only 0.91% of the community is still on these versions of Windows. The majority of those impacted, 0.69%, use Windows 7 64-bit.
Taking into account data from SteamDB, which shows a daily average of more than 30 million users on the platform, more than 210,000 players continue to use Windows 7, 7 64-bit or Windows 8. The biggest risk is that security updates have also been stopped.
You read right: a Google Chrome update prompted Steam to end support for the app for Windows 7 and Windows 8. As you explained in your note, some features of your client work through a Chrome embedding. Since Google discontinued support for these operating systems, Steam had to do the same.
Steam also explains that, as of now, it is no longer able to guarantee the functionality of the platform on these Windows. In other words, in addition to the end of full support, if the client stops working, Steam will respond with a “and who says that’s my problem?”.
Steam only warns that the platform may continue to run for a while longer, even without updates. After all, even if even Microsoft doesn’t support these OSes anymore, there are still games that can run on them. The company’s recommendation is that the 0.91% of users of these systems upgrade to higher versions.
