Well W7 is practically 15 years old, and already stopped receiving updates itself. It's not really up to Steam to keep it up and running ~~even~~ especially if Microsoft no longer bothers to update the OS, it would just get more and more problematic, and they also had to let it go at some point.

I don't think anyone cares about W8 though, even Microsoft itself barely seemed to put effort in making it work.

[–] Sabin10@lemmy.world 57 points 5 days ago (1 children)

To be fair, it's not just a steam thing. My understanding of the situation is that chromium is dropping win7 support so anything using chromium will stop working on older operating system.

[–] icedterminal@lemmy.world 31 points 5 days ago

Steam uses the Chromium embedded framework in case anyone doesn't know. This renders the web pages in the Steam client. As mentioned, there's no point in Valve maintaining the code base themselves when upstream Chromium drops support for 7.

This is similar to when browsers dropped support for Flash. Adobe stopped developing it and the major browser vendors removed their in-house flash plugins.

[–] Nightweb@lemm.ee -3 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I actually disagree here, as I have games that I purchased that only work in win98/winXP/7 I think they should make one “last” version that supports those old systems to facilitate the old games on these old versions. No new features or anything just what’s needed to provide access to these old games

[–] eyeon@lemmy.world 36 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Isn't the last version already that..well..last version?

If anything they could just leverage their work with proton that allows steam to play windows games on Linux to provide similar compatibility shims for old windows on modern windows

[–] kn33@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

If I remember right, the first Tomb Raider (at least before the remaster) was shipped with DOSBox to be about to run.

[–] themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

If you own track mania nations forever on steam, you will be unable to run it on a modern OS. You can install mods to make it work but the game is still for sale and if you're unaware the mod exists, you'll never be able to play it again

[–] scutiger@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

It runs fine on Linux.

It's true that most people wouldn't know, and probably wouldn't look that far into things before buying a game. Fortunately Steam's refund policy is pretty good for this kind of situation.

[–] andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 6 points 5 days ago

There is a version of it on Internet Archive that I don't know if it's from Valve or not. It's zipped installation of Steam. But I had no luck making it work, it's webpage renderer still crashes at launch. As I've read into it, the old version should work for a while without updates.

https://archive.org/details/Steam_Windows_7

[–] OfficerBribe@lemm.ee 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Tried compatibility mode already?

[–] gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Or machine virtualization, VirtualBox and similar programs are piss easy to learn to use and most machines today should have 0 issue emulating older windows and an old game in a VM

Any issues you might have are going to be hardware related, like really old games not playing nice on no original hardware, but if you've got one of those then just install the last version of the OS and isolate that original hardware machine from any networking and it's completely safe to use as a game console