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Steam Dropping XP&Vista Support


i430VX

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I was browsing Twitter and saw something about steam ending support for XP. Not believing, I went to the Steam website, and unfortunately its true.

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Starting on January 1 2019, Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems. This means that after that date the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows. 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.

The newest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows. In addition, future versions of Steam will require Windows feature and security updates only present in Windows 7 and above.

For the remainder of 2018 Steam will continue to run and to launch games on Windows XP and Windows Vista, but other functionality in Steam will be somewhat limited. For example, new features such as 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.

I've been told there's several games that require XP to run on Steam. Considering that, it seems like a dumb move.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1558-AFCM-4577

 

Edited by i430VX
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Why not just make it not update if it is installed on XP or Vista? I'd imagine the "launcher" portion of Steam would continue to work, such as the redeem, drop-downs and the game library. If they are saying that they will make it so you can't play your games anymore, that would be a big problem. If things keep the same way, eventually they would just do that to me and my Windows 7 Steam computers and say I'd need to use Windows 11 or whatever.

And there aren't "several" XP games on Steam, there are thousands, maybe even tens of thousands.

And going forward, would the Steam client allow you to buy and install XP games from a Windows 10 system? Such as:

Return to Castle Wolfenstein: https://store.steampowered.com/app/9010/

Which is 2000/XP. I'm sure that it would since I already know the Steam client will allow a purchase and attempt install of a 64bit game on a 32bit OS. :rolleyes:

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Why not just make it not update if it is installed on XP or Vista? I'd imagine the "launcher" portion of Steam would continue to work, such as the redeem, drop-downs and the game library. If they are saying that they will make it so you can't play your games anymore, that would be a big problem. If things keep the same way, eventually they would just do that to me and my Windows 7 Steam computers and say I'd need to use Windows 11 or whatever.

Seems smart to me. :}

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And there aren't "several" XP games on Steam, there are thousands, maybe even tens of thousands.

I knew it wasn't just several...I'm known for my massive understatements.

 

Maybe this will just be another iTunes and continue to work for a while after 01-Jan-19

 

Edited by i430VX
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I remember many years ago when Steam was new, people were concerned about the DRM angle. Well, more like livid than anything else. Much criticism bandied about over how Steam gives Valve the ultimate say over who owns the product by requiring you to run the games through their distribution platform.

Valve's announcement puts new weight to those arguments. If all you've got is an XP machine (which is the case for me, as I do not have the money or spare living space right now to build a separate, dedicated gaming PC like I've wanted) then any games you've bought on Steam will no longer be yours to play. Blizzard announced their intent to do this to XP users last year, using Battle.net updates to revoke access to games which supported XP at launch. Heroes of the Storm and Starcraft II, games which XP can run no problem, now unplayable.

Given that XP users receive a megaton of ridicule wherever they pop up, I doubt anyone outside of the XP enthusiast community is going to care enough to back us up on that. The people playing games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, games which do not run well (or at all) on OSes newer than XP, might back us up, but I think most of them just jury rig solutions to get those games running in Windows 10 or somesuch.

There is a wiki list of games you can buy on Steam which do not actually require Steam to run, but many games will still launch the Steam app if you try to play them without Steam anyway. Still nice to know what you can still play even if Valve won't let you use Steam anymore.

On 6/13/2018 at 7:04 AM, Tripredacus said:

Why not just make it not update if it is installed on XP or Vista? I'd imagine the "launcher" portion of Steam would continue to work, such as the redeem, drop-downs and the game library. If they are saying that they will make it so you can't play your games anymore, that would be a big problem. If things keep the same way, eventually they would just do that to me and my Windows 7 Steam computers and say I'd need to use Windows 11 or whatever.

I recommend e-mailing Gabe Newell and proposing this to him. He keeps his e-mail address public, and in dev commentaries from Valve games he almost always mentions it: gaben AT valvesoftware DOT com. I'm going to be writing him an e-mail myself. Sure, the chances of him seeing the e-mails are slim, much less actually acting on our behalf. However, it doesn't hurt to try. The more he hears from people who will be affected by this, the more he might be inclined to throw XP (and Vista) users a bone.

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39 minutes ago, TrevMUN said:

I remember many years ago when Steam was new, people were concerned about the DRM angle. Well, more like livid than anything else. Much criticism bandied about over how Steam gives Valve the ultimate say over who owns the product by requiring you to run the games through their distribution platform.

Valve's announcement puts new weight to those arguments. If all you've got is an XP machine (which is the case for me, as I do not have the money or spare living space right now to build a separate, dedicated gaming PC like I've wanted) then any games you've bought on Steam will no longer be yours to play. Blizzard announced their intent to do this to XP users last year, using Battle.net updates to revoke access to games which supported XP at launch. Heroes of the Storm and Starcraft II, games which XP can run no problem, now unplayable.

Given that XP users receive a megaton of ridicule wherever they pop up, I doubt anyone outside of the XP enthusiast community is going to care enough to back us up on that. The people playing games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, games which do not run well (or at all) on OSes newer than XP, might back us up, but I think most of them just jury rig solutions to get those games running in Windows 10 or somesuch.

There is a wiki list of games you can buy on Steam which do not actually require Steam to run, but many games will still launch the Steam app if you try to play them without Steam anyway. Still nice to know what you can still play even if Valve won't let you use Steam anymore.

I recommend e-mailing Gabe Newell and proposing this to him. He keeps his e-mail address public, and in dev commentaries from Valve games he almost always mentions it: gaben AT valvesoftware DOT com. I'm going to be writing him an e-mail myself. Sure, the chances of him seeing the e-mails are slim, much less actually acting on our behalf. However, it doesn't hurt to try. The more he hears from people who will be affected by this, the more he might be inclined to throw XP (and Vista) users a bone.

wont happen even if you email, even 150,000 people weren't enough to change valve's rules, we had a petition for cs:go in which 150k people signed it to bring a change in the trading and valve even saw it and replied its highly unlikely that the rule would be reverted, they dont really care anymore it seems :(

https://www.change.org/p/valve-corporation-revert-to-old-cs-go-trading-rules/

Edited by burd
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I'm not too worried about this. Since I'm from the United States, I'd rather not patronize or support a company that believed it would be a good idea to market and profit off of a school shooting game. Public outrage promptly corrected Valve's poor judgement

Parents of Parkland victims are outraged about a new video game that would let players shoot up a school.

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22 hours ago, sdfox7 said:

I'm not too worried about this. Since I'm from the United States, I'd rather not patronize or support a company that believed it would be a good idea to market and profit off of a school shooting game. Public outrage promptly corrected Valve's poor judgement

For those of us who have bought games through Steam, I still don't like the idea of having products I purchased to own, not rent, effectively taken away like this. Had someone told me in the past that Steam would be doing things like preventing people from running games usable with older OSes, I would have found other ways to buy those games.

This is the reason why, when I had the money to spare, I bought Adobe Illustrator CS6 and not Creative Cloud. This was back when CC was just rolling out. I want to spend my money knowing that it's going toward a program that will run on the machines I own, not suddenly become unusable in the future.

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23 hours ago, sdfox7 said:

I'm not too worried about this. Since I'm from the United States, I'd rather not patronize or support a company that believed it would be a good idea to market and profit off of a school shooting game. Public outrage promptly corrected Valve's poor judgement

Parents of Parkland victims are outraged about a new video game that would let players shoot up a school.

While such a game is definitely in very poor taste, I'm not certain "public outrage" should be a sufficient justification to suppress freedom of speech or more specifically the freedom to create content, however distasteful it may be. The appropriate response is simply not to buy it, as opposed to silencing whoever produced it. Banning a game will not bring back the dead nor prevent evil/sick people from doing evil/sick things. But this is OT for this thread anyway.

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On 6/13/2018 at 4:04 PM, Tripredacus said:

Why not just make it not update if it is installed on XP or Vista? I'd imagine the "launcher" portion of Steam would continue to work, such as the redeem, drop-downs and the game library. If they are saying that they will make it so you can't play your games anymore, that would be a big problem.

Maybe because Project Zero started targeting games: https://twitter.com/taviso/status/955540415263907840
And steam client is a tasty target for fame lusting Google hackers :)

I do not play games that often anymore, and I tried to avoid Steam (or any client that ties me to 'any' platform like this), so I have little games that I am concerned about. Single-player ones can be easily run outside the Steam usually, so only problem (for me) would be manually backuping saved games. Real problem is with multi-player games that uses steam servers to manage players and track progress. For me it's only Red Orchestra 2 (which I can run on 7 anyway). So, I do not loose much, but it shows how bad it is to be tied to one monopolist, who can change rules whenever he wants, because he can and you have no way to opt out :)

On 6/15/2018 at 7:19 AM, sdfox7 said:

Since I'm from the United States, I'd rather not patronize or support a company that believed it would be a good idea to market and profit off of a school shooting game.

Your argument is invalid, as Steam does not check the games for quality anymore:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)#Steam_Direct

5 hours ago, LoneCrusader said:

But this is OT for this thread anyway. 

And is danger close to being 'political discussion' anyway...

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3 hours ago, Mcinwwl said:

Maybe because Project Zero started targeting games: https://twitter.com/taviso/status/955540415263907840
And steam client is a tasty target for fame lusting Google hackers :)

I still think there should be an option for XP and Vista users to play their Steam library without Steam running, within reason. Especially if we're talking about single player games. Losing Steam's community functions/achievements isn't as big a deal for me as losing access to the games for which I paid.

Makes me wish I had bought them on Good Old Games instead; so far I've not encountered a game there which is tied to a GoG DRM client. You can download the installers for the games directly.

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1 hour ago, TrevMUN said:

I still think there should be an option for XP and Vista users to play their Steam library without Steam running, within reason.

These things are called cracks :w00t: and many games are being cracked just after release. So the initial argument they had, with Half-Life 2 being uncrackable, is long gone :>

GOG Galaxy is optional, and AFAIK also dropped XP as far as i know.

Installers, however, are XP upwards, except for a games that are too new and thus not XP-compatible.

Bad thing about GOG is that installer might not work on original system, and I mean here win 95/98 games (DOS games can usually be run outside DOSBox)

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13 hours ago, LoneCrusader said:

While such a game is definitely in very poor taste, I'm not certain "public outrage" should be a sufficient justification to suppress freedom of speech or more specifically the freedom to create content, however distasteful it may be. The appropriate response is simply not to buy it, as opposed to silencing whoever produced it. Banning a game will not bring back the dead nor prevent evil/sick people from doing evil/sick things. But this is OT for this thread anyway.

I totally agree, I'm just voicing my "freedom of speech" opinion. We have laws for a reason, otherwise there would be chaos. However, today we have many situations where there is no accountability (like Valve). This is exactly what's wrong with the world today. In the name of profit, anything goes, regardless of the consequences. Our entire political system revolves around money.

Since this is off topic, this is all I will say on the matter!

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  • 3 months later...

@sdfox7Additionally to your statements being OT, they're probably not quite compliant with the forum rules (speaking of law).

Nevertheless, I completely agree with you!-snip- then anything's possible!

Enough said.

c

Edited by Tommy
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Please do not discuss politics here, it's strictly against forum rules and has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

2.b Topics devoted to political or religious debate, unless technology related, are prohibited. MSFN is a technology forum and both political and religious debates have caused many problems and distractions in the past. Political or religious links in signatures or polite, courteous comments in non-political or non-religious topics are allowed, but we cannot allow any topics in which the sole purpose is to debate political or religious issues.

Next comment out of line and I'm locking this thread so please keep it clean. Thanks.

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5 hours ago, Tommy said:

Please do not discuss politics here, it's strictly against forum rules and has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

2.b Topics devoted to political or religious debate, unless technology related, are prohibited. MSFN is a technology forum and both political and religious debates have caused many problems and distractions in the past. Political or religious links in signatures or polite, courteous comments in non-political or non-religious topics are allowed, but we cannot allow any topics in which the sole purpose is to debate political or religious issues.

Next comment out of line and I'm locking this thread so please keep it clean. Thanks.

The topic was not devoted to political debate, but I did make a point about technology related software, and I believe the average person would agree the software was created in poor taste regardless of your political views.

Nevertheless, I digress, and I'm not sure why someone felt the need to be petty and drag it up three months after I made the comment. This is all I have to say.

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