Valve Kills Support For Windows 7, Windows 8 And CS:GO, What You Need To Know

At the top of last year, Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1, closing out an era of operating systems that were already on life support as it were. Just a few months following that, Valve shared that Steam would no longer be supporting these platforms come 2024 and that gamers should look to migrate to systems running Windows 10 or later. Now that the new year has rolled over, Steam support has officially ended alongside support for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

As of January 1st, the Steam support article explains that “Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems.” With this, the Steam Client on these systems will no longer get updates, including security updates, making running Steam a vulnerability now. This change is occurring because of Steam core functions, which “rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows.” As such, Steam will now require Windows feature and security updates, which are only available through Windows 10 and up.


Beyond this change, Valve has also terminated support for a legacy version of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. This legacy edition was meant to be a stopgap solution for gamers who could not launch Counter-Strike 2 on DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems or macOS. The support post explains that those who fit into this niche represented under one percent of CS: GO players. Regardless, from now on, Counter-Strike 2 will only support 64-bit Windows and Linux as CS: GO finally falls by the wayside.

Technically speaking, this is the end of another era in the gaming realm, as many people hold fond memories of gaming with friends with Steam running on Windows 7. Of course, as it goes, it is time to lay those memories to rest and move forward to bigger and better things. This is especially true given all the exciting gaming content coming just over the horizon of 2024.