Steam has died its final death on Windows 7 and 8: Nearly a year after Valve ended support, new Steam updates will no longer function on the ancient OSes
If you were still gaming on Windows 7 or 8 in 2024, almost two years after Microsoft itself abandoned its own children, it's definitely time for an upgrade: Steam's most recent client update is the first to not work on the old OSes, more than 11 months after Valve announced it would stop supporting them.
"This version of the Steam client will no longer run on Windows 7 or Windows 8," reads the accompanying documentation of the November 5 Steam client update. "Users on these OS versions will not automatically update to this new version of the Steam client."
Really, the news is less that you can no longer download the latest version of Steam on Windows 7 and 8, but that it took this long to happen after Valve announced the end of support for them back in January. "We expect the Steam client and games on these older operating systems to continue running for some time without updates after January 1st, 2024," Valve wrote on the Steam support website at the time, "but we are unable to guarantee continued functionality after that date." According to Valve, the embedded version of Google Chrome required for core functions of the Steam client was the impetus for the move—it just doesn't support older versions of Windows anymore.
As of October's Steam hardware survey, only .28% of users were still on Windows 7, while there were no reported users at all on Windows 8. Not only is that one final damning indictment of the awkward, touchscreen-centric Windows 8 before it's gone for good, that Windows 7 figure is actually kind of confounding—that's higher than the percentage of Windows 7 and 8 users combined in the December 2023 Steam Hardware survey PCG senior editor Wes Fenlon cited at the beginning of the year!
If you're still gaming on Windows 7 in 2024, especially if you installed Steam in just the past year, please drop me a line. You are fascinating. If you're still gaming on Windows 8 and just skipped the survey, it's about time you upgraded that college laptop—you've more than gotten your money's worth.