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
Isn’t the last version already that…well…last version?
If anything they could just leverage their work with proton that allows steam to play windows games on Linux to provide similar compatibility shims for old windows on modern windows
If I remember right, the first Tomb Raider (at least before the remaster) was shipped with DOSBox to be about to run.
If you own track mania nations forever on steam, you will be unable to run it on a modern OS. You can install mods to make it work but the game is still for sale and if you’re unaware the mod exists, you’ll never be able to play it again
It runs fine on Linux.
It’s true that most people wouldn’t know, and probably wouldn’t look that far into things before buying a game. Fortunately Steam’s refund policy is pretty good for this kind of situation.
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?
Or machine virtualization, VirtualBox and similar programs are piss easy to learn to use and most machines today should have 0 issue emulating older windows and an old game in a VM
Any issues you might have are going to be hardware related, like really old games not playing nice on no original hardware, but if you’ve got one of those then just install the last version of the OS and isolate that original hardware machine from any networking and it’s completely safe to use as a game console
RIP Win7. You did what no other Windows could do. You had functioning components.
Win 7 really was the best of them all.
XP.
Fight me.
Vista, followed by XP.
Kinda weird of me to be throwing this out there as a longtime Linux user, but TBF XP was quite good too, maybe even better for its time than 7.
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.
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
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.
Oof thank you though
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.
No reason not to go now.
Time, my last hold out is my main gaming rig, I have it set up exactly as I want it and I don’t want to rewrite the entire thing.
Valid
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.
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.
Fuck them then, it’s even worse when you think of the multiple ways you can update or switch to a Linux distro
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.
Just use Windows 10 or Linux
Just use
Windows 10 orLinuxFtfy
lol win 7 probably still can run more games than Linux
Linux can slightly run more tho,since windows 7 is eol.
My Steam Deck runs most games just fine.
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It’s surreal reading comments pining for win7/8. i am getting old.
Windows 3.1 was the first one my family had.
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. 😬
