https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-800A#:~:text=Steam%20Support%20%3A%3A%20Windows%207%20and%20Windows%208%20Support&text=As%20of%20January%201%202024,on%20those%20versions%20of%20Windows.
"As of January 1 2024, Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems. After that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows."
More importantly - "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."
I might have worded that wrong. I WANT to run Windows 98 and Windows XP on these old PCs. It’s part of the experience, and the reason I even bothered to put them together. If you’ve ever watched LGR, it’s pretty much that kind of hobby.
Imagine you grew up in the 90s and at the languages school they had indigo and green G3 iMacs. Now that you’re older and drunk in nostalgia, you hunt for one until, after years, you find it. It’s green, beautiful, and it’s all yours.
Now you want to use it to play games of the era. You purchase them on Steam, as opposed to just pirate them. Steam works on this G3 of yours, (just an example since Steam never worked on G3 iMacs, but you get the idea.) and you’re able to play these old games as they were meant to be played, without issues.
Out of the blue, VALVE decides that Steam is just going to support the latest M-iMacs. The game and Steam are installed on your G3, but when you open the game, a pop-up appears reminding you that Steam isn’t compatible with this iMac. You try to run the game out of the executable file but get the same results. You’re effectively fucked, finding yourself crawling back to GOG, MyAbandonwaredotcom, your torrent site of choice, or your M2 iMac which have massive issues running these old games.
Niche case? Sure, but it still happens, and it’s exactly what is going to happen to the current generation of game consoles in the future.
There are exactly 0 companies that are going to make their lives harder for 0.0001% of their customer base. You’re the one with the niche hobby, you figure out how to make it work. Find the original discs or something. That’s not Steam’s problem.
Wrong.
There are companies that have built their customer base out of taking the extra step to cater the “0.0001%” of Steam’s: GOG, Humble Bundle, Kickstarter, and Itch.
1/3 of the Cyberpunk 2077’s pre-orders were made on GOG. I think “0.0001%” is a bit too pessimistic, don’t you think?
Absolutely agree. One of many reasons I’ve never bought anything on Steam, is Steam infects games with their Steam software. You don’t get the game “plain”. You get the game totally dependent on what Steam does with it. Like not running on an old machine anymore.
GOG gives me a backup of the game installer that has no GOG at all in it. I can save that backup to a DVD as an archive. Yes I do own the game, independent of GOG. I can get it to work, anywhere that it can be made to work. That might be easier or harder depending on where I try, but I can do it. I can do it 20 to 40 years from now if I remember to copy my DVDs, keep them alive, don’t get them burned in a house fire, don’t lose them, etc.