Windows 7 and 8 now dead for gaming, as new Steam update pulls support
Windows 7 and 8 now dead for gaming, as new Steam update pulls support
After a recent update, Steam is no longer working on the Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating systems, and users will finally need to upgrade.
Well the last good windows is dead.
Once windows 10 is dead I am full Linux, I have already begun the transition, any time I have to install a new Os it’s now fedora 40.
Well W7 is practically 15 years old, and already stopped receiving updates itself. It's not really up to Steam to keep it up and running
evenespecially if Microsoft no longer bothers to update the OS, it would just get more and more problematic, and they also had to let it go at some point.I don't think anyone cares about W8 though, even Microsoft itself barely seemed to put effort in making it work.
To be fair, it's not just a steam thing. My understanding of the situation is that chromium is dropping win7 support so anything using chromium will stop working on older operating system.
Steam uses the Chromium embedded framework in case anyone doesn't know. This renders the web pages in the Steam client. As mentioned, there's no point in Valve maintaining the code base themselves when upstream Chromium drops support for 7.
This is similar to when browsers dropped support for Flash. Adobe stopped developing it and the major browser vendors removed their in-house flash plugins.
I actually disagree here, as I have games that I purchased that only work in win98/winXP/7 I think they should make one “last” version that supports those old systems to facilitate the old games on these old versions. No new features or anything just what’s needed to provide access to these old games
There is a version of it on Internet Archive that I don't know if it's from Valve or not. It's zipped installation of Steam. But I had no luck making it work, it's webpage renderer still crashes at launch. As I've read into it, the old version should work for a while without updates.
Tried compatibility mode already?
TBF an online Windows 7 copy is just asking to be Hacked given Microsoft support ended in 2020 and security updates after that required a paid subscription which ended in 2023.
Pulls support or bricks the program on those systems? There's a difference.
Valve pulled support for Steam at the start of January 2024 for Windows 7/8. I thought that was the end, but apparently it actually just meant "Steam may still run but we don't support it in any way". Which surprised me when I booted up the old Windows 7 PC a few months ago and discovered that Steam still ran and seemed to work.
Apparently this update is actually incompatible and now Steam won't run at all.
It's probably the inbuilt browser component that seems to be in everything these days.
Chrome pulled support for Win 7 and 8 ages ago, so anything that relies on an up to date browser is sure to follow.
Oof thank you though
The title of that article is kind of weird. It's just wrong to claim they are dead for gaming because of a lack of steam.
Anyone can just get Witcher 3, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Stardew Valley, or Anno 2070 from GoG and for each of them you can game for another 50 hours without needing steam. Or get Minecraft from their page directly and play for 100 hours. This is all without going to any retro titles.
You need to tweak a lot to get latest minecraft java version running on Windows7
Ah sorry I hadn't heard that they switched to Java 21 with 1.20.5
If you hate Windows 11 and don’t mind tinkering, I’d almost think Linux would be a better option especially if your preference is for retro games.
I've tinkered plenty even when using Windows haha. I even have a Windows 98 and Windows XP virtual machine for some old things, but everything I care about seems to have a modern HD release, a userpatch or can be hooked with dxwnd, so I don't use them anymore at the moment.
But yeah probably the long term solution is Linux. Personally I wouldn't run Windows 7 anymore. The unfixed CVE list has become quite long. I just went checking for the above titles out of principle, because I don't like this conflation of PC gaming with only Steam.
I still haven't made the jump to gaming on Linux, unfortunately. Although I've been running a dual boot for the last 8 years or so, because I used Linux for my studies, use it for my work, and for hosting my game servers on a second computer, so I would be in a prime position... but so far I have just gone the way of least resistance, which is still Windows 10 at the moment.
But I have a deadline now: October 2025. Just need to figure out the best distro, I don't think I'll use my existing Fedora KDE install for this. Maybe Arch, or one of these new immutable distros, that might be neat for when different games require different versions of libraries.
It's surreal reading comments pining for win7/8. i am getting old.
This is what game launchers looked like in my day.
If I wanted a different game I'd put in a different tape!
It's surreal reading comments pining for win7
Oh no they've been in a coma since 2012!
I jest, but seriously I was in HS personally while whinging about 8 and wanting 7 back after my laptop auto updated on me like a jackass. Its actually the event that lead to me learning IT!
Windows 8 is actually great. It's the last efficient OS from Microsoft. I mean, you can actually be surfing on the internet and have 4 GBs of RAM and you're actually having a good time? By good I mean like 2.5 GB used with the browser open.
Well apparently you could before windows 10, or there's something wrong with my laptop but it's always chuggin along after boot at like 3.25 Gb used easy.
Maybe it's because all the fancy x86 emulation it does is actually pretty RAM hungry too. Oh well.
(It's a Samsung Galaxy book go. They're dirt cheap! And I actually quite like it, it's been my main computer for a few years now actually. )
Windows 3.1 was the first one my family had.
The Chromium base, which is what Steam is built upon, itself isn't supported on Win 7,8. Can Valve work upon it to make it backwards compatible? Maybe. Will it be a pain in the ass to maintain? Absolutely.
Also, if you don't want to upgrade to Win11, you can make a 2nd partition for Linux and enjoy your games.
This is one of the things, that’s not only a colossal amount of effort to maintain, but also a colossal waste of money. Backporting security is expensive. Backporting features to an old is is even more costly. With the W7 platform shrinking into obscurity, it just doesn’t make sense
You could also use Win10 with ReviOS, AtlasOS, Ghost Spectre etc. as an addition to your Linux partition
Im still preparing myself mentaly to jump to linux the next year with the out of service of 10. Its hard because stop using adobe as graphic designer... I hope we have get real linux alternative at that moment.
I believe in you! Personally, when I find someone charging me subscription prices for something that should have a one-time fee, I flip the bird and run to the nearest competitor, but I can't speak for your line of work. For my amateur needs, open source alternatives have gotten the job done, and I wish you the best.
As a profesional i dont have an alternative. Anyway i use the 2023 ver. Pirated. I dont like all that IA integration.
Its hard because stop using adobe as graphic designe
Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and After Effects all worked when I tried them on Linux Mint 22 to see if they worked
Older versions from before the CC updates for those programs that you can use them for also work and work quite well, though I do understand that there are literally missing features for professional work in some of those older versions
A real Linux alternative (or proper fucking Support but fuck adobe) would be GREAT, but the change likely won't be as bad as you might be worrying
So far the hardest thing I've had to install was called YAD, and that was so I could install Morrowind mods specifically, a rather niche need all things considered, and I've made multiple audiovisual projects on my Linux workstation without having to do anything like that
I do keep a Win10 LTSC on a side boot drive for games with anticheat and any programs I might need there but so far that's literally only been handbrake, which I'm sure there's a Linux version/alternative for but I just haven't had to use it on that OS yet due to work flow
People will mention Gimp, but check out Krita as an alternative to Adobe
If you want to migrate to Linux, I would strongly suggest you set up a dual boot, and start playing with it to gain experience. Being able to switch back to something you know is a massive benefit when you are still learning.
While Linux has come a very long way, you are sure to experience some hitches along the way. If not because of Linux itself, then because you are not familiar with how to do "that one thing" on Linux.
You can install Photoshop on Windows and copy it to Linux. It's a very involved process but it's doable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzZQV5CBsGE
You might have some luck running it using Wine or Crossover.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=17
Who still uses windows 7 or 8? Who actually uses it for gaming?
I was using 7 right up to the point last year steam said they'd stop supporting it.
I run a computer into the ground because I'm broke.
I did the same thing, but mostly because my computer worked, did what I needed it to do, and I was too lazy to replace it until I was basically forced to.
After building a new PC and switching over to Linux I was like "why didn't I do this a long time ago?"
I was doing the same thing (I too run my computers into the ground, though I also didn't want to move to Windows 10 because of all the analytics at the OS level sending data to them MS added to that version, plus and frankly, it worked so I couldn't be arsed).
I also switched some time ago, pushed by Steam's impending end of support plus more and more stuff coming out without Windows 7 support.
However I took the dive and switched to Linux rather than Windows 11, to a great extent prompted by people here reporting good experiences gaming on it (since I already have quite a lot of expertise in it and I mainly just use my PC for gaming) plus it's part of a broader set of changes to avoid enshittification (such as replacing my TV-Box with a Mini-PC with Linux) I'm doing at home and am very happy with the result.
It's less heavy than Windows, even booting faster and seems to have extended how long I can keep going before that computer is totally run to the ground, though for that it also helps that once I started upgrading by changing the OS, I also went and did a few partial upgrades of the hardware, like replacing my old CPU with an equally old one but twice as powerfull - which used to cost 200 bucks but now was 17 bucks second hand - a more powerful graphics card and a more modern SSD disk for the games partition (it's actually a modern M.2 SATA on a 2.5 inch housing adaptor, and that's as fast as SATA ever got and to get better than that you need a PCIx M.2) - basically I did the upgrades I could do on the cheap without changing motherboard and everything else that depends on it (like memory and a newer generation CPU) and which would still be compatible with the Windows 7 boot partition I still have around (though I haven't actually been booting it). Since I went from Windows 7 to Linux rather than Windows 11, none of the hardware upgrades was wasted in just making up for the extra bloat on Windows 11 and the machine definitelly feels a lot more performant.
As for games, most just work, about 1/3 need extra tweaking to work well or work at all and only 1 or 2 so far I couldn't get to work at all.
Curiously at least one game - Borderlands 2 from Steam - that didn't work on Windows 7, works on Linux. Also I can now run games whose minimum Windows version is 10 which I couldn't before.
Also since all non-Linux games are running on the Wine compatibility layer, Linux is actually better backwards compatible with older Windows and DOS than Windows itself, which is nice for Patient Gamer types like me.
I think that with Linux in it my PC is actually compatible with more games than it was with Windows 7.
I seriously think it's one of my best decisions in years.
I sincerely hope you weren't doing anything important with that machine.
There are a lot of reasons to not want to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11, so it's likely those people who defiantly choose not to move on. In the case of Windows 11, it also requires newer hardware just for TPM support.
I could not upgrade from 7 to 11 because the hardware was bad, yes. I did try to upgrade before this also, but it also didn't want to upgrade to 8? Or maybe it was 10. I forget why it refused to do those two systems though.
We lost Yuzu because of a Windows 7 user. Whoever that guy was, he deserved this.
how?
He got upset at the Yuzu developers for dropping support for Windows 7, and after throwing a tantrum in a GitHub Issue report, he directly emailed Nintendo and their legal team with a massive word salad directly linking to Yuzu. Multiple times. Then within around a month or two Nintendo initiated a lawsuit.
Does the CLI still work? If so, you could download and play all the Windows 7 compatible, DRM-free games in your library just fine. Alternatively, if you already had these games installed, they'll work fine without launching Steam first.
couldn't you just run games through linux?
It's about Steam itself. Not about the games. Steam has a Linux build while the article is about the Windows build.
Mixed results.
For games that could run on Win7 and 8? Not really
Does it also pull support for old Linux distributions?
Not directly but I'd think they'd pull support for older system packages & kernels, which would eventually affect you. There's not really much of a reason not to upgrade your Linux distros though.
They don’t support new technologies (Wayland), why would they drop support for old ones?
Does it also affect SteamCMD?
Probably not. The main culprit is probably the bundled, Chromium-based web renderer (CEF), not Steam itself.
Plenty of alternative stores that don't require a launcher, so still possible to sideload games and therefore, 7 and 8 are not quite dead yet. (side note, but Vista is still also a decent system for gaming)
I like to invoke the old magic of installing from a disc.
Reminds me of disc-based DRMs. With how moody some were, I'd need to dump the ISOs, mount them with WinCDemu, and keep them mounted for as long as I kept playing those games. 😬