PC gamers forced to upgrade as Valve ends Windows 7 support for Steam
If you've got an old gaming PC that you've been using to do some casual to moderate gaming on, I hate to break it to you, but Valve needs you to change.
Specifically, Valve needs you to drop Windows 7 and Windows 8 and upgrade to at least Windows 10 if you want to keep using Steam as your one-stop gaming shop after this year.
According to a new Steam Support update(opens in new tab), «Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems,» effective January 1, 2024. «After that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows. In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of Windows.»
The issue is that new features in the Steam frontend rely on an embedded Google Chrome instance, and since Google Chrome has sunset its technical and security support(opens in new tab) for those operating systems, Valve will have to ditch those OS versions as well.
As for how many gamers this will affect, Steam Hardware Survey(opens in new tab) reports that only 1.86% of all Steam users use Windows 7 or Windows 8. There are more Mac Gamers than there are Windows 7 and 8 gamers, so this really isn't going to be that big of a blow to the user base, but for those who are affected, you do at least have til the end of the year to migrate to Windows 10 or later.
So there is inevitably some frustration with a software-hardware lifecycle when the product you are using works just fine, thank you very much, and then someone comes along and makes you buy an upgrade that you don't really think you want or need.
In the case of Windows 7 and Windows 8, this isn't a matter of trying to upsell you on a
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