Valve has announced that Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems on January 1st, 2019. What this basically means is that the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows after that date and as such you won’t have access to your older games that could – theoretically – still run on these operating systems.
As Valve stated:
“In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of Windows.”
For the remainder of 2018 Steam will continue to run and to launch games on Windows XP and Windows Vista, but other functionality in Steam will be somewhat limited.
Valve concluded by encouraging all users on these operating systems to upgrade to newer versions of Windows in order to have ongoing access to the latest features of Steam, and to ensure future access to all games and other Steam content.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Good, i saw they’re starting to prepare to launch the new steam interface which everyone can try by going into the settings and select beta partetipation.
end of an era
It is 2020 soon.. i guess its fitting.
Completely unacceptable imo, there are still many games that simply work better in xp or have xp exclusive features. They should still have a legacy client to still access your games.
I agree, a legacy client for the library would be the best.
Which games for example? Genuinely curious.
Any game that used EAX for one, it’s hardware unsupported in anything past xp.
You can still access and play all of your games in Windows 7 and 10. EAX was great, but in any case you should ask Microsoft to keep supporting it, Creative to release the source code for it, and developers to keep implementing it into their games, instead of demanding Valve to continue support for a decaying, 17 years old operating system.
Besides, can’t EAX be emulated these days?
Valve wouldn’t need to actively support a legacy client, they could remove literally all features from the client other then being able to download or install/transfer your games still for a older os in which you bought your games for with the intention of being able to continue to play them.
As far as emulation goes, not really. There is a hack out there to enable it but it results in buggy and popping noises with low quality playback.
Do you really think Valve would invest time and money to make a separate Steam client for the handful of people still using Steam with Windows XP?
It’s not just a matter of deselecting some check boxes and voilá: here’s a stripped version of the Steam client. They would have to build it from the ground up.
Valve already has a working client for xp, they could just simply allow it to continue working as far as downloading installing/games/activating if other features stopped working who cares.
Also I agree that valve has no interest in providing their core service or protection to its current customers. They even let publishers patch content out of your games as licenses expire and there is nothing you can do about it. One of the reasons i haven’t bought a game on steam in 2 years.
This is why I don’t trust clients.
Wow, this is some BS. I’m suddenly reconsidering buying any more games on Steam if they get to dictate which OS I can use.