Tuesday, March 28th 2023
Valve Discontinuing Steam Support on Windows 7/8/8.1 as of 2024
Valve has confirmed that its Steam platform will no longer support the Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 operating systems as of January 1st, 2024. Valve discontinued support for Windows XP and Windows Vista back in 2019.
Valve says that after that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows and users will need to update to a more recent release. The reason behind such a move, according to Valve, is that the newest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome which no longer functions on older versions of Windows, and that the future of Steam will require Windows features and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above.
Source:
Steam
Valve says that after that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows and users will need to update to a more recent release. The reason behind such a move, according to Valve, is that the newest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome which no longer functions on older versions of Windows, and that the future of Steam will require Windows features and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above.
77 Comments on Valve Discontinuing Steam Support on Windows 7/8/8.1 as of 2024
Yeah there's always linux hell steam will probably give up and make their own linux distro lol
GoG has many of those games on their platform from your list, such as:
Sacrifice
Fallout 3
Fallout New Vegas
Elder Scrolls Morrowind
Darkstar One
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Flatout
Dawn of War (marked as coming soon on GoG)
Now you don't have to worry about these games requiring a digital platform, such as Steam, being required to run on the OS you're using. Steam is just a type of DRM that will eventually keep you from being able to play the games you've paid for. Either through the lack of OS support or some day they just shutter and you're SOL.
You won't get any kind of refund from Steam. Be mad at them all you want, but it really is no one's fault except for those that have kept their faith in them and continued to use and support them. I stepped away from buying on Steam over 4 years ago and I don't regret it, I wish I did it sooner, but it is what it is. Sure, I might miss out on a few games that never come to GoG that I find interesting and would like to play, but I've got so many other games to play it's not the end of the world.
Key for what
Win-10 upgrades are free still.
Regardless Steam statistics are enough, so... Sorry 2% (even less by the time deadline arrives).
Believe it or not, most people dont want to constantly tinker with the OS (see also: why linux never took off). Thus 10 and 11 are horrendous operating systems, glorified spy platforms that take monstrous resources just to run the same thing that 7 could do on 2GB of RAM and without offending my eyes. Thus why I'll happily pay $60 for a GoG release but anything on steam I only pay $15 or less on sale. You're not buying, you're renting, and while valve is better then most it is still DRM.
But hey, at least you dont have DRM in your games and you have to use an entire hard drive to house the ISO files. Thats nice i guess.
Also the reason Valve pulled support for XP, Vista and now 7 is the same - it's not "pure laziness", it's that the world moves on and they use CEF to build the client as a web application. CEF stops working, Steam and everything else stops working, fullstop.
Spotify already discontinued Windows 7 as well. When I open it on my 2008 R2 machine it says this version of Windows is no longer supported. Still works, but who knows for how long. Opera is just another Chromium fork nowadays. Their proprietary Presto engine died a decade ago. I am probably missing out on your sarcasm, but SteamOS came out 10 years ago...
Yeah I don't follow linux or steam very much
I only have one free game on steam I haven't played in years batman arkham knight but bat mobile is pretty fun but doubt it's worth looking into steamos to play it on.
None of this, of course, excuses the bloated spyware infested nature of windows 10 and 11. You should NEED to debloat these systems in the first place. Just because you can run third party programs to plug some of the spy holes does not make it OK for those spy holes to exist. Oh no, I gotta use a $100 drive to permanently hold all of the software I purchased, the HORROR! Guess I better move all my software to subscription based DRM so daddy MS can watch my every move! /s.
Yes, its actually very nice to have all the software I have purchased on hand, DRM free, so I can use it whenever and wherever I want. I dont know why you think owning the software you want is bad, but if tying your software to forced cloud accounts makes you happy, then go right on ahead. Some people are into voyeurism, I guess.
*this post is intended to be nerd humor
Things like Falcon 4.0 just won't run from its base steam install, without a third party client replacement,
There are some Win9x titles that run in turbo on processors exposing RDTSC. To be fair, these have a fix on Vogons/PCGW.
I don't see this as a real issue, Windows 7 extended kernel should be able to run Chrome 110+ by the time Steam moves over to using a CEF variant based on it.
Of course it doesnt excuse it. Unforunately, it is the world we live in now. And choosing to stay on an old, unsupported operating system such as Windows 7 and 8, leaves you susceptible to security vulnerabilities that will no longer be patched. Im going to assume you meant that we shouldn't need to debloat these systems in the first placae, but again, debloating the OS was around since before Windows 7. So whats the excuse there? "Spy holes" didnt exist then like they do now.
Are any of those ISO's that you have multiplayer? Do they still have to connect to the game servers in order to play? Guess what? Those servers can be taken down and the game becomes worthless anyway. Which is basically the reason why Steam is no longer supporting Windows 7 and Windows 8 because something on the backend is Chrome based and Chrome is no longer supporting Windows 7 and 8. So theres that. Also, if youre worried about "daddy MS" watching your every move, I got news for you; youre on cameras all over the place. Your ISP and cell phone company would also like a word. So if youre worried about privacy, dont worry, you dont have any.
You dont even notice steam DRM and you make it sound as though youre in some exclusive club just because you dont buy shit on steam. BTW, i can log into my steam account on any computer in the world and still have my games. We share that experience. Only difference is i dont have to worry about dropping my hard drive or it failing on me and I lose all the ISO's.
So would i prefer to have Steam to manage my game library? Absolutely. Does it have its share of cons? Sure. Nothing is perfect. Do I like the fact that i can save my saved game data in the cloud so i can pick up where i left off 10 years later when Im on a completely new computer and that data isnt on my computer? Hell yeah!
Youre just stuck in the past. But to each their own.
github.com/86Box/86Box/releases/tag/v3.11
VMware now supports advanced DirectX 11 graphics emulation: VMware Workstation evaluation link, amongst other things. Running Windows XP and chiefly 7 natively is no longer necessary.
There are unofficial patches that improve stability but they're still not 100%. Stop defending laziness. A legacy client would be pretty simple to pull off and manage by a very small team of people. GoG doesn't support XP either, but at least they provide off-line installer for all their games. I've started moving away from steam as soon as they dropped XP support.
I don't advertise using XP or 7 on modern machines, for daily use in any way. Like I said, I have Retro PCs for my old games covering all eras of gaming - the point is I'd like to get old games I own available on these retro machines as well.
BTW, New Vegas crashes because of spaghetti code, not because of newer versions of Windows, there are many community mods, bugfixes and even an anti-crash DLL that is designed to work with NVSE - all of these are must haves to play New Vegas on PC regardless. It's a very, very poor port, Obsidian didn't know how to use Bethesda's engine and had limited time and budget to figure it out.
Unmodded Fallout 3 (which you shouldn't really bother IMO - install TTW) has a two-line fix in its settings ini to disable dual-core CPU support (which is what breaks it)