Valve is ending support for Steam on Windows 7 and 8.1 PCs

Starting January 2024, Valve will end Steam support for Windows 7 and 8.1. However, a quick look at the Steam Hardware Survey reveals it’s not all doom and gloom.

Valve, the company behind Steam and Counter-Strike, will be culling support for their store on Windows 7 and 8.1 starting in January 2024. The move, which might seem alarming, is actually partly due to Steam’s recent upgrades.

In a fairly transparent blog post, Valve states that this is due to Steam using an “embedded version of Google Chrome”. We’re assuming that Steam now runs a Chromium backend to power its store and features within the application.

Google itself “sunsetted” the support for Chrome on Windows 7 and 8.1 in October 2022, with version 109 being the last to run on the elderly operating systems. Google reasons that this is due to Microsoft finally completing their extended support for 8.1, which concluded in January of this year.

Less than 2% of Steam users are on Windows 7 and 8.1

However, looking at the monthly Steam Hardware Survey from February 2023, reveals that less than 2% make up the Windows 7 and 8.1 users on Steam. With most major games now no longer supporting Windows 7 anyway, Valve’s removal of the older operating systems wasn’t an if, but a when.

Microsoft is currently gearing up for the next two years being Windows 10’s last before they also put that into extended life support. In 2025, Windows 10 will no longer be supported, forcing people off the operating system to continue to get security updates.

Upon Windows 11’s launch in 2021, the reception wasn’t great when it was revealed that older systems wouldn’t be supported. Due to the requirements, a large portion of PCs will be stuck on Windows 10 until that particular user can upgrade the hardware itself, or circumvent it with a community installation.