Re: Steam finally kills Win7/8 support

On Mon, 25 Nov 2024 14:01:07 -0600, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:

On Mon, 25 Nov 2024 11:49:47 -0500, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
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>
It's no surprise --Valve announced their intentions way back in late
2023!-- but now it's finallly happened.* The newest versions of Steam
will no longer run on Windows 7 or 8 (or MacOS 10.13/10.14). So if you
still have a Windows 7 gaming PC, well... say goodbye to any
Steam-launched games on that system.
>
Time to upgrade those old Win7 machines to Linux, I guess.
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* as of November 5th. Okay, I'm a bit late with the announcement ;-)
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/4472730495692571025
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You know, we were worried about Steam in the early days for the wrong
reasons. It looks like we will (mostly) always have access to our games,
but planned platform obsolescence in the client requires us to upgrade
our OS software beyond compatibility with the older titles. We lose our
games _that_ way. Did not see that coming.
>
Is it still possible to download your games with an old client? If not,
then that's the problem. That Steam insists on only its latest version.

No. At least, it didn't with my XP machine (I have a Win7 box still,
but I don't have Steam on it). With XP, Steam insisted it needed to be
updated to the newest version and tried to update itself whenever
connected to the internet. Then it discovered, 'Oh, hey, I can't run
on XP' and quit with a message to that fact. There was never any
opportunity to actually install games.

Presumably if you have an XP (or Win7) machine with Steam (and
Steam-games) already installed, AND it's not connected to the
Internet, you're still safe. For a while, at least. I've had instances
in the past where Steam just demanded it be connected to the internet
first before it let me play any of my games.

Because of this, there is, as far as I can tell, no way to play "Half
Life 2" on era-appropriate hardware with an era-appropriate operating
system. I know a lot of people don't care about that... but some of us
do.