Steam on Windows 7 and 8, it’s almost over!

The message is short, almost laconic, but the decision taken by Valve will not surprise many people.

Valve’s communication on the subject is minimal. No press release, no particular announcement, it is a simple message published in the “Support” zone of the official site which informed us.

Another nine months…

A message that does not take gloves to evoke that from the 1^er January 2024, the Steam platform will no longer officially support Microsoft’s older operating systems.

In this case, the announcement concerns Windows 7 (released in 2009), Windows 8 (2012) and Windows 8.1 (2013). As Valve points out, after this date [du 1^er janvier 2024], the Steam client will no longer launch on these versions of Windows. To continue using Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to be on a newer version of Windows “.

Valve justifies its decision by the fact that its customer ” relies on an integrated version of the Google Chrome browser which no longer works on older versions of Windows “.

Less than 2% of Steam users

The Steam publisher also points out that future versions of its client ” will require Windows features and security updates that are only present on Windows 10 and above “.

More pragmatically, this end of support is nothing more than the natural evolution of a platform that had already dropped support for Windows XP and Vista in 2019. Both operating systems do not then represented more than a tiny fraction of Steam users.

It is the same today. Taking into account the latest survey on the configuration of Steam users, we see that Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 represent less than 2% of all users, a little more than Linux (1.27% ), but less than MacOS X (2.37%).

Source : Steam