MANILA, Philippines – Valve announced in a support page post that it will be ending Steam support for Windows XP and Vista by 2019.
This means that starting January 1 of next year, the Steam client and the games purchased through it will no longer run on the above-mentioned versions of Windows.
The reasoning behind this lies in the new features of Steam, which rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome. This version of Chrome is not available on those versions of Windows.
Adding to this, future versions of Steam will reportedly require features and security updates only present in Windows 7 and above.
Those currently on either Windows XP or Vista would be glad to hear Steam will continue to run and launch games on these operating systems for the remainder of 2018 with limited functionality. Features including the new Steam chat will not be available.
“We encourage 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.”
Judging by the recent information obtained from the May 2018 Steam hardware survey, the discontinuation would not hurt Steam too much – only 0.22% of the service’s users run Steam on Windows XP. – Rappler.com
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