Steam officially stops supporting Win7/8/8.1 systems

According to the Steam announcement, as of January 1, 2024, Steam is officially discontinuing support for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 operating systems.

The Steam client will not be able to run on these Windows versions, and users will need to update to a newer version of Windows in order to continue running Steam and all games or other products purchased through Steam.

The official explanation for the discontinuation of support is because Steam's core functionality relies on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer runs on older versions of Windows.

In addition, future versions of Steam will require Windows features and security updates that are only available in Windows 10 and later.

However, this change is only expected to affect a small percentage of gamers.

Steam's November hardware survey showed that only about 0.94% of Steam platform users are still using Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1, and over 95% of gamers are already using Windows 10 and Windows 11.

It is understood that Steam is no longer supported on January 1, 2019 for Windows XP, Windows Vista systems.