Security News > 2023 > March > Steam will drop support for Windows 7 and 8 in January 2024
Valve announced that its Steam online game platform will officially drop support for the Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 platforms starting January 1st, 2024.
Once it reaches the end-of-support date, the Steam Client software will stop working on these out-of-support Windows versions, with Valve recommending users to upgrade to a more recent Windows version to continue playing their games via Steam.
Today's announcement comes after Microsoft revealed on January 10th, 2023, that it stopped providing security updates and technical support for all Windows 7 editions.
Currently, Windows 7 runs on over 5.39% of all Windows systems worldwide and Windows 8.1 is used by 1.15% of customers, both quickly losing market share since Microsoft's January announcement, according to Statcounter GlobalStats.
Microsoft and Steam are not the only companies giving up on Windows 7 and 8, with a similar announcement by Google saying that Chrome version 110 would be dropping support for Windows 7/8.1 starting February 2023.
The impact of this change will likely be minimal since only 0.10% of users are still using Windows 7 while 0.36% run Windows 8.1, according to the Steam February 2023 Hardware & Software survey.