“Steam to drop support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 by Jan 2024”

Valve has announced that it is ending support for Steam on some older editions of Windows. From 1 January 2024, Steam will cease to function on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1, as the newest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on these older versions of the operating system. Future versions of Steam will rely on features and security updates that are present only in Windows 10 and beyond. An estimated 0.09% of players use a Windows 7 system, with an additional 1.43% running Steam on the 64-bit version, while Windows 10 constitutes the largest percentage of players at 62.33%. Dolphin Emulator, a popular app for playing Nintendo Wii and GameCube games on PC, will soon be available on Steam, and was described as “an experiment” by developers.