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Hundreds of Thousands of Windows XP and Vista Users Won't Be Able To Use Steam Soon (vice.com)
Windows XP and Vista users have six months to upgrade their operating systems or get the hell off of Steam. From a report: "Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems," Valve, the company that operates Steam, said in a post to its XP and Vista support community. "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."
Last time I bought a boxed game (2010s some time), it included a Steam key which was required to play.
According to the latest Steam Survey, https://store.steampowered.com... , apparently 0.22% of the Steam user still does.
It came out 16 years ago, but it was sold in NEW computers less than a decade ago. When Microsoft was anxiously trying to get people to move to the abysmal Vista the customers often discovered that the "Vista Ready" computers were not able to run Vista and so some vendors would downgrade to XP in order to sell them.
Oh please, if they actually gave a flying flipping fuck about that then damned near every GCW crack wouldn't be based on the Steam vrsion of the games!
As someone who has actually worked support I can guaran-damn-tee ya its trying to keep support staff that actually knows how to deal with that ancient shit is just too much of a royal PITA. At the shop I worked at I was the only guy that still knew the old DOS/Win 3.x/Win9X OSes and software and you'd be amazed how much old industrial gear like CNCs are locked to some ancient version of DOS or Windows so if one of those companies came through the door? Suddenly everything I was doing had to be tossed to someone else who may or may not have a clue WTF I was working on because if we didn't do this? Yeah there simply wasn't anybody else that had a damned clue about dealing with that old shit.
You have to remember when dealing with support it can be a fricking nightmare when you are just dealing with one or two OSes and until the cutoff date Valve has been dealing with SIX, not to mention the hardware...dude do you even remember what kind of hardware they were selling when XP was an OEM? We're talking Pentium 4s and Netburst celeron.../shiver/, hell just waiting for a damned diagnostic to run on those piles of shit can take three fricking forevers due to how bad Netburst sucked ass, and you expect them to support that mess? And Vista was NEVAR a good OS, I can't even imagine trying to figure out whether its a game bug or just one of the bazillion Vista bugs that was causing a problem, better them than me!
So no its not the DRM, if it were they would have minimums that include CPUs with hardware DRM support. Nope I bet this is someone at management looked at the numbers and went "holy shit XP and Vista users are taking up HOW much time? Yeah...no, that crusty old shit has gots to go!" and as someone who still runs into the occasional XP or Vista user in the wild I say good riddance, that shit is just too damned old and creaky to be supporting in 2018.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.