Valve ends Steam app support for Windows 7 and 8

Devices running Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 will now have to say goodbye to the Steam application as Valve officially pulls the plug on any further updates.

“As of January 1, 2024, Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems. After that date, existing Steam Client installations on these operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind, including security updates,” Valve said in an official statement.

To receive further updates and proper working of games purchased, users will now have to upgrade their Windows device to either Windows 10 or 11. It is just a matter of time before the current version stops working properly on older devices.

“We expect the Steam client and games on these older operating systems to continue running for some time without updates after January 1st, 2024, but we are unable to guarantee continued functionality after that date,” Valve added.

The reasoning behind this move is Steam features that rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome. However, support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 was dropped earlier by Microsoft as well as Google, Valve will now be able to update the app for compatibility.

Furthermore, future updates will also require Windows 10 and 11. The company strongly recommends updating the Windows version for future updates and security reasons, as older versions are more vulnerable to malware attacks.

Similarly, the company also recently stopped support for Counter-Strike Global Offensive and announced that it will be moving forward with Counter-Strike 2. While the game can currently be played with bots, with further updates, it will become incompatible and lose most of its functionality.

However, the latter is not related to Windows limitation in any form. Although, Counter-Strike 2 did see hardware requirements increase with its release.