Steam Release Notice: Starting January 1, 2024, the Steam platform will officially stop supporting Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 operating systems. The notice states that after January 1, 2024, existing Steam client installations on these operating systems will no longer receive any type of updates – including security updates.
According to Valve, the reason is that the latest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer runs on older versions of Windows.
This change is expected to only affect a small percentage of players, and according to the hardware survey conducted by Steam in November, only about 0.94% of users who are still using Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 are still using the Steam platform, and more than 95% of gamers are already using Windows 10 and Windows 11.