Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Steam is Removing Support

Plutonius

Plutonius

macrumors G3
Original poster
Feb 22, 2003
9,270
9,038
New Hampshire, USA
Starting January 2024, Steam will stop support on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1
Starting February 2024, Steam will stop support on MacOS 10.13 and 10.14
In October 2025, Windows 10 will be end of life so Steam will support it at least until then.

When Steam stops support, the Steam app will stop going online once Steam updates the app to the point that the unsupported app will not run (i.e. there is no way to know when it will stop going online).

Steam should still be able to be run offline but will lose access to DLC that requires Steam to be online.

Note - Before Steam becomes unsupported and people eventually lose the ability to download the games they have bought (on the unsupported computer), people should probably install all the games they purchased.

-------------------

I recognize the fact that older software becomes unsupported. My only complaint is that Steam should allow you to run your DLC without requiring you to be online.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Wheel_D, Huntn, Irishman and 1 other person
I'm honestly surprised Steam supported macOS 10 for so long. A lot of apps cut those versions off. Makes sense, especially as more machines start becoming Apple Silicon as well.

Windows 10 support being cut off in 2025 surprises me as well. I can see 10 being pretty evergreen, especially how long people like to use a single version of a Windows OS. Then again a decade of support is not unreasonable. I'm surprised 7 got 15 years before finally being cut off.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Huntn
kaioshade said:
I'm honestly surprised Steam supported macOS 10 for so long. A lot of apps cut those versions off. Makes sense, especially as more machines start becoming Apple Silicon as well.

Windows 10 support being cut off in 2025 surprises me as well. I can see 10 being pretty evergreen, especially how long people like to use a single version of a Windows OS. Then again a decade of support is not unreasonable. I'm surprised 7 got 15 years before finally being cut off.
Click to expand...
October 2025 is also when Microsoft ends support for Windows 10, so it seems to make sense to keep with that timeline, IMO.
 
  • Like
Reactions: kaioshade
chrfr said:
October 2025 is also when Microsoft ends support for Windows 10, so it seems to make sense to keep with that timeline, IMO.
Click to expand...
You're right. I completely forgot 10/2025 was the official cutoff as well.
 
kaioshade said:
I'm honestly surprised Steam supported macOS 10 for so long. A lot of apps cut those versions off. Makes sense, especially as more machines start becoming Apple Silicon as well.

Windows 10 support being cut off in 2025 surprises me as well. I can see 10 being pretty evergreen, especially how long people like to use a single version of a Windows OS. Then again a decade of support is not unreasonable. I'm surprised 7 got 15 years before finally being cut off.
Click to expand...
As mentioned, Microsoft is cutting off support then too. It certainly feels a little faster than MS usually does, but looking at the timelines it's pretty comparable (Windows 7 got roughly 10 years and change with the basic support.) I guess it's more impressive Steam kept serving 10.14 for legacy 32bit games on Mac considering Apple has a much faster obsolescence timeline.

This definitely does make me consider my plans going forward. Might want to create a 10.14 partition on my Mac and dump all the games to it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Plutonius and kaioshade
Plutonius said:
Starting January 2024, Steam will stop support on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1
Starting February 2024, Steam will stop support on MacOS 10.13 and 10.14
Starting October 2025, Steam plans to stop support on Windows 10

When Steam stops support, the Steam app will stop going online once Steam updates the app to the point that the unsupported app will not run (i.e. there is no way to know when it will stop going online).

Steam should still be able to be run offline but will lose access to DLC that requires Steam to be online.

Note - Before Steam becomes unsupported and people eventually lose the ability to download the games they have bought (on the unsupported computer), people should probably install all the games they purchased.

-------------------

I recognize the fact that older software becomes unsupported. My only complaint is that Steam should allow you to run your DLC without requiring you to be online.
Click to expand...

I knew about Windows 7-8.1 and macOS 10.13-10.14, but Windows 10?!

Do you have a source on the Windows 10 bit because they only said in the news post that 7, 8, and 8.1 were losing support. Windows 10 is still extremely popular on Steam with 60% of all Windows users on Steam being Windows 10 and only 30% being Windows 11.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Huntn
kaioshade said:
I'm honestly surprised Steam supported macOS 10 for so long. A lot of apps cut those versions off. Makes sense, especially as more machines start becoming Apple Silicon as well.
Click to expand...

The reason they supported macOS 10 for so long was because of old legacy Mac games that are 32 bit. They'd keep supporting macOS 10, but the cutoff is happening because Chromium is losing support for these old versions of macOS, which is what Valve uses to power the Steam Client. Windows 7-8.1 are losing support for that exact reason too.
 
  • Like
Reactions: T'hain Esh Kelch
Spaceboi Scaphandre said:
I knew about Windows 7-8.1 and macOS 10.13-10.14, but Windows 10?!

Do you have a source on the Windows 10 bit because they only said in the news post that 7, 8, and 8.1 were losing support. Windows 10 is still extremely popular on Steam with 60% of all Windows users on Steam being Windows 10 and only 30% being Windows 11.
Click to expand...

Looking again through the Steam forums, I can't find anything official now on Steam ending Windows 10 support :( so I edited my initial post.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Huntn and Spaceboi Scaphandre
I’m surprised Steam is going to drop Windows 10 support. Windows 11 doesn’t even offer a better gaming experience over Windows 10?

But since Microsoft is dropping Windows 10 support in 2025 officially, we could have seen this coming.

Steam will force alot of people to buy a new PC basically.

I do wonder if this will be the rise of Linux. Gaming on Linux is gaining popularity these days and with Microsoft (and now Steam) actively trying to kill their most popular OS by far, Linux is starting to look more attractive for alot of people probably.
 
Last edited:
  • Haha
Reactions: Irishman
Zest28 said:
I’m surprised Steam is going to drop Windows 10 support. Windows 11 doesn’t even offer a better gaming experience over Windows 10?

But since Microsoft is dropping Windows 10 support in 2025 officially, we could have seen this coming.

Steam will force alot of people to buy a new PC basically.

I do wonder if this will be the rise of Linux. Gaming on Linux is gaining popularity these days and with Microsoft (and now Steam) actively trying to kill their most popular OS by far, Linux is starting to look more attractive for alot of people probably.
Click to expand...

They're not dropping Windows 10. The OP got that info wrong and edited it out

Oh wait...it's still there? @Plutonius you forgot again!
 
If you bought a game you should be able to play that game for as long as you wish. It’s called ownership. I can understand that the game updates maybe become incompatible with older/unsupported systems but as long as you don’t want or need to update you should be able to play without restriction.
 
canadianreader said:
If you bought a game you should be able to play that game for as long as you wish. It’s called ownership.
Click to expand...

True, but that's why people keep old computers and old consoles and emulators around to play old titles. We can't expect new systems to be forever compatible with old software. It would be great if they could but the maintenance and bug fixing costs would be persistent.
 
canadianreader said:
If you bought a game you should be able to play that game for as long as you wish. It’s called ownership. I can understand that the game updates maybe become incompatible with older/unsupported systems but as long as you don’t want or need to update you should be able to play without restriction.
Click to expand...
The concept of ownership is incompatible with modern software distribution.

Welcome to the future.
 
  • Like
Reactions: canadianreader
canadianreader said:
If you bought a game you should be able to play that game for as long as you wish. It’s called ownership. I can understand that the game updates maybe become incompatible with older/unsupported systems but as long as you don’t want or need to update you should be able to play without restriction.
Click to expand...

you do own it and can play it for as long as you wish if u have a compatible system. this is almost entirely a Mac problem because modern windows still lets you run legacy apps.

blame apple for creating new technologies that prevent you from running older programs (or yourself for relying on apple to keep such legacy support when old thinkpads on eBay exist)
 
  • Like
Reactions: canadianreader
cbum said:
Anyone tried to use VMWare Fusion or Parallels to run old MacOS versions on M-class Macs?
Click to expand...
You can do that but you can't run Mojave in Fusion or Parallels if that's what you're thinking. There's no ARM version of Mojave and VMs don't emulate CPUs. Your better off running Windows in a VM and using Windows' x86 to ARM translation layer to run old 32 bit games.
 
  • Like
Reactions: cbum
cbum said:
Anyone tried to use VMWare Fusion or Parallels to run old MacOS versions on M-class Macs?
Click to expand...
VMware Fusion does not support running macOS at all on Apple Silicon Macs. You cannot virtualize any of the old Intel-only OSes in Parallels on Apple Silicon, either.
 
kaioshade said:
Windows 10 support being cut off in 2025 surprises me as well. I can see 10 being pretty evergreen, especially how long people like to use a single version of a Windows OS.
Click to expand...
Yep, in fact Microsoft is now talking about extending support until 2028. More details are coming "soon", apparently.
 
Mac Source Ports may be of help to a few, however is pretty much limited to games that are free or the developer's have open sourced the game engine.

Doom 3 - New game engine & updated graphics
1701899759631.png

Doom 3 The Lost Mission, patched over from Doom 3 BFG
1701898837696.png

Doom 3 - Hell Knight (originally Hell Baron) from the Macworld 2001 preview
1701899312272.png

Homeworld - Classic
1701898218766.png
All the games/engines on Mac Source Ports should run natively on Apple Silicon & Intel 64 Bit.

Q-6
 
  • Like
Reactions: Huntn
It's theoretically possible to "decompile" commercial games back into source (this was done with Super Mario 64) and then update/recompile to run on more modern platforms. I imagine that it's a huge amount of work at present, but I wonder whether the tools will get better over the next few years. There are likely to be legal question marks around such a thing though.
 
It doesn't matter, I don't plan to use OpenGL to develop games on the Mac platform on MacOS 10.13 and 10.14, let alone metal. Even though the UE4 I am using has a metal interface,
But I am still very unhappy. Steam's approach is just to reduce the number of games for Mac, usually only developers using Unity or UE engines have the ability to provide games for Mac. The exception is for those who can write their own metal renderer. I think it should be refrigerated in the refrigerator.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back