Support for the Unsupported

[DKatana]

This thread is for vocalizing wholesome and reasonable support for those continuing to use Windows 7 and 8 for Steam gaming. As of yesterday these operating systems became unsupported on Steam.

As so many topics rightly said: there are valid reasons for keeping Windows 7 and 8 for PC games. Certain old or niche games are incompatible or run badly on Win 10/11. Older PCs cannot run Win 10/11 so well. Some are opposed to the telemetry and data collection introduced with Win 10, or prefer the simpler, easy to use aspects of 7. No amount of 'lol just upgrade bro' invalidates these issues.

[PistoIeiro]

No, I dont think so.

You are not obliged to use Steam, move on or choose another platform.

[Wolf Knight]

Originally posted by DKatana:

This thread is for vocalizing wholesome and reasonable support for those continuing to use Windows 7 and 8 for Steam gaming. As of yesterday these operating systems became unsupported on Steam.

As so many topics rightly said: there are valid reasons for keeping Windows 7 and 8 for PC games. Certain old or niche games are incompatible or run badly on Win 10/11. Older PCs cannot run Win 10/11 so well. Some are opposed to the telemetry and data collection introduced with Win 10, or prefer the simpler, easy to use aspects of 7. No amount of 'lol just upgrade bro' invalidates these issues.

please list the games that are incompatible with win10/11

if the computer can run win7, it can run win10 since they have the same system requirements.

your complaining to the wrong group. if you want support for 7, take it up with MICROSOFT, they are the ones that need to update win7 to get is supported again.

[Gamer Mickey]

Not a chance in hell that Valve will reverse their decision when only 0.06% of Steam users are on Windows 7 for gaming, according to the latest Steam hardware survey.

What you're doing is akin to someone throwing a paper airplane into the wind and wondering why it came back at you.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/

[R A Z E R]

It's not going to happen no matter how many of these posts are being made, i get that it sucks and all but it's the cold hard truth.. If steam keeps on supporting a OS that was dropped by MS themselves, it would only give them a bad rep/name.

[Steven Seagull]

Originally posted by Gamer Mickey:

Not a chance in hell that Valve will reverse their decision when only 0.06% of Steam users are on Windows 7 for gaming, according to the latest Steam hardware survey.

What you're doing is akin to someone throwing a paper airplane into the wind and wondering why it came back at you.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/

At least get your facts right: it is not 0.06% but 0.74% (0.06+0.68).
See here: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

And if we count in Win 8.1 users too, that gives 0.89% in total.
Because the support for Win 8.1 has ended too, just like for Win 7.

[Steven Seagull]

Please, list those games which are not compatible with Windows 10 but compatible with Windows 7 AND cannot run without Steam. Also, it might be possible that some of those games can be run on Ubuntu via WINE. I would really like to see a list like that.

[Tommy Wiseau✔]

for the games that runs bad on windows 7/8 or simply doesn't run (I've been there myself even tho it's quite rare.) Just play them in a virtual machine running windows 7.

Here's your fix. Now it's time to upgrade.

[Steven Seagull]

Originally posted by Anemoya:

for the games that runs bad on windows 7/8 just play them in a virtual machine running windows 7.

Here's your fix. Now it's time to upgrade.

It is not a fix because GPU acceleration is very poor inside a VM. Except if you run it from under KVM.. but that is not always possible because the motherboard might not support it. And it is not something that anybody can just set up in 5 minutes. You need dualboot into Linux, supported hardware, luck, skills, much patience and time.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

[Chocolate Pie Kitten]

The telemetry already existed in win 7 but you were not allowed to opt out with win 10 you can. WIN 10 respect more your privacy

I had before a potato pc running win 7 and installed win 10 and oh miracle it was free and running very well on this pc

Most win 7 users against win 10 points are just lies or rumors

[ุ]

So, now that it's 2024 we can expect a huge influx of "I can has Win7 support?" threads instead of "Steam is stealing from us, I'm not upgrading" threads?

[Cray]

As always, this seems met with mostly what you'd expect from internet forums, or people in general these days, an overall "you are wrong, and therefore 100% wrong" with no concession even if there are valid points in the mix.

Some even seem to like to pretend this is a non-problem. And yet there's been so many threads about this in the past couple of months I've lost count, lots of people are clearly unhappy with it. Valve should've announced their plug pulling at least 2 years ago, 5 would've been a better choice (or you end up with situations like these, that's what the IT industry learned overall).

It's odd how many fail to see the basic problem some people have with this: "I have a box with games on it, I just want to keep playing them, without going into offline mode for ever, it works for me and I paid for these, I just don't wanna touch it". They can roll the dice and see how far it goes, but it'll probably break in time.

I switched to Linux a while back (not new for me, just hasn't been my gaming rig choice before) due to various reasons, but I could also have switched to win10 or 11, but chose not to, simply because:

Win10 and 11 take too much control of your system. I considered switching and changing all the irksome bits, but learned that even if you do so, a few updates later they'll break the changes you made and it's back to square one.

They're near impossible to actually wrangle with and get control back from, because with every odd update they'll break the changes you made and/or introduce something new.

Windows has become a CaaP (customer as a product) leaning OS, with increased focus on tying the user into cloudl services, displaying ads (which some pretend aren't ads) on the start menu, and collecting all sorts of data and telemetry (not to mention the extra leaked by the bundled apps, etc.).

So when people tell others to 'just switch', there's usually a touch of catch-22;

You can stay on Win7, but it'll eventually stop working entirely.
You can switch to win10/11, but if you don't like the data collection you'll just have to put up with that, damned if you do and damned if you don't (no, you can't just mod it away forever).
You can switch to Linux, but you'll have to learn a new OS, and not all games work properly there yet.

Having used linux as a daily driver for decades I'm pretty comfortable with it as a desktop, but as a gaming system it's still lacking, I wouldn't tell someone on Windows to jump ship if they just want to play games and have things working properly out of the box. Sure, proton is great, they've done an amazing job with it, and wine itself has gotten heaps better over the past 20 years, but it doesn't even nearly cover everything yet.

Of course, the writing was on the wall. microsoff stopped supporting win7/8 completely in early 2023, and not long after valve made the announcement. And therein lies the rub - microsoft had warned about this many, many years in advance and reminded people repeatedly that support would be ending. Valve didn't.

So why didn't valve pay attention in class and do the same thing? If the OS maker is ending support in X years, and your user stats and hardware survey data show clearly that lots of people are still using these systems, how about you just start warning people equally early on, and prepare them as thoroughly as microsoff did?

There's a reason MS did it with years advance warnings, they've learned just how much inertia you have to expect from real life scenarios, and that it's unrealistic and naive to work with any other assumption.

So they learned and warned early. Valve didn't pick up on this by now basic wisdom of planning.

If they'd just put two and two together, which they could've done years ago, and announced this properly years ago, there wouldn't be threads like these in 2024.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Originally posted by Leonardo Da Pinchi:

So, now that it's 2024 we can expect a huge influx of "I can has Win7 support?" threads instead of "Steam is stealing from us, I'm not upgrading" threads?

Expect it to get worse when a Beta releases that will not run on Windows 7... then another when that Beta becomes the released client.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by DKatana:

This thread is for vocalizing wholesome and reasonable support for those continuing to use Windows 7 and 8 for Steam gaming. As of yesterday these operating systems became unsupported on Steam.

As so many topics rightly said: there are valid reasons for keeping Windows 7 and 8 for PC games. Certain old or niche games are incompatible or run badly on Win 10/11. Older PCs cannot run Win 10/11 so well. Some are opposed to the telemetry and data collection introduced with Win 10, or prefer the simpler, easy to use aspects of 7. No amount of 'lol just upgrade bro' invalidates these issues.

Name these niche games.

[NakiBest]

Several old macOS versions are dropped too!
You do not mention that, why the Windows bias!? :)

[Spawn of Totoro]

Originally posted by NakiBest:

Several old macOS versions are dropped too!
You do not mention that, why the Windows bias!? :)

To be fair, so are some versions of Linux as well. Some may have to upgrade from Ubuntu 16 to Ubuntu 18, at the least, to keep using Steam. As an example, that is. I know it happens, but not what versions.

So even Linux users can't stay on a specific version past a point. It is something that effects ALL OSs.