No more Steam for those with old Windows computers  

From the beginning of next year

Steam , Valve ‘s popular PC gaming platform , has announced that it will stop supporting older versions of Windows starting January 1, 2024. This means that users who are still running Windows 7 , Windows 8 , or Windows 8.1 on their PCs will not they will be able to use Steam and therefore play their games through it.

The reason for this decision, according to Valve’s official announcement which can be found here , is as follows: Several features of Steam rely on a built-in version of Google Chrome, which no longer works on older versions of Windows. Additionally, future versions of Steam will require Windows features and security updates that are only available in Windows 10 and Windows 11.

So, Valve advises users who want to continue using Steam to upgrade their operating system to a newer version before the aforementioned deadline. Note that most users can upgrade to Windows 10 for free using their existing key from Windows 7/8/8.1. However, upgrading to Windows 11 may also require hardware changes, since the requirements have changed, calling for newer CPUs and the TPM 2.0 security chip.

It is worth noting that according to the statistics collected every month by Valve itself, most Steam users have already switched to Windows 10 or Windows 11, which together represent more than 94%. Only a small portion of PC gaming platform users are still using Windows 7/8/8.1, accounting for less than 2%.

For the record, Steam isn’t the only gaming platform to drop support for older versions of Windows. Earlier this month, Fortnite also announced that it was ending support for Windows 7 and 8.