Valve has just announced that the Steam Client has deprecated Windows XP and Windows Vista. On January 1st, the Steam Client will stop playing video games unless you upgrade to at least Windows 7. They have also announced that new features, like the updated Steam Chat, currently in Beta, will not be brought to those platforms, because why would they bother when they’re going to obsolete in about six-and-a-half months? Don’t poke it if it works, and fix what doesn’t.

The pun writes itself…

Linux and macOS are still fine of course.

In terms of market share numbers, 32-bit Windows XP is sitting at around 0.34%; Windows Vista is unlisted. I doubt this will affect many of our viewers unless they have a “retro PC hobby”. Still, to some extent, it sucks that DRM shuts down games that could otherwise run on the target environment. It’s not like they can just make the games DRM-free for the affected OSes, though, but it’s still something to think about.

And, yes, both OSes (XP SP3 and Vista SP2) are already deprecated by Microsoft.