Ladies and gentlemen, a page is turning in the world of video games. Valve has announced the end of support for older Microsoft operating systems on its Steam platform. On January 1, the company announced the end of support for the oldest Microsoft operating systems still in circulation. This applies to Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1!
Valve drops support for Windows 7 and 8/8.1 on Steam!
On Valve’s support page, we can read that support for the oldest Windows systems has been dropped. In other words, clients installed on the aforementioned OSes will no longer receive updates, not even security updates. You are therefore advised to switch to Windows 10 or Windows 11 to continue enjoying Valve updates.
In addition, Steam’s latest hardware surveys indicate that the majority of users have already switched to Windows 10. In December 2023, 0.71% of users were still on 64-bit W7 compared with just 0.16% on 8.1. By way of comparison, 55.44% of Windows installations are on W10, while 43.51% are on W11. So it’s clear that these older systems are in a very, very small minority!
Finally, as a reminder, Windows 7 is clearly not a new system, having been launched in October 2009. As for Windows 8, it saw the light of day in October 2012, while 8.1, a major update to W8, was launched a year later in October 2013. We’re talking about systems more than 10 years old.
