With the arrival of the new year, Valve has officially dropped support for older versions of Windows. This means that Steam users that are still running Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 will need to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11 in order to continue using the digital storefront.
It is worth noting that Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 users can still make use of Steam for the time being. However, since the platforms won’t be getting any update, any bugs or issues that might pop up with newer releases of Steam will not be getting any fixes from Valve. This also means that, at some point, Steam might essentially just stop working on the older versions of Windows altogether.
Valve had originally announced the end of support for older versions of Windows back in March 2023. The company stated that, since it makes use of an embedded version of Google Chrome for Steam, it has to keep up its operating system requirements with Chrome itself. Chrome has dropped support for versions of Windows older than 10 quite some time ago.
Interestingly, Valve has supported Windows 7 longer than Microsoft, which had officially ended support for the operating system all the way back in 2020. Windows 8 and 8.1 on the other hand saw support from Microsoft end in January 2023.