Valve’s Steam client is pretty widely compatible with all kinds of newer and older operating systems—that’s what you do when you want as many people as possible spending their money in your store. But nothing lasts forever, and Valve does eventually end support for old software when it’s time to move on. The company announced in a support note today that it would be ending Steam client support for 32-bit versions of Windows on January 1, 2026.
“Existing Steam Client installations will continue to function for the near term on Windows 10 32-bit but will no longer receive updates of any kind including security updates,” the support note reads. “Steam Support will be unable to offer users technical support for issues related to the old operating systems, and Steam will be unable to guarantee continued functionality of Steam on the unsupported operating system versions.”
When Steam drops support for an older operating system, it’s often because support is also being ended in some other underlying piece of technology that Steam uses to function, like its Chromium-based built-in browser. Valve cited “system drivers and other libraries that are not supported on 32-bit versions of Windows” as the reason for ending 32-bit Windows support.
Though the 32-bit versions of Windows were widely used from the mid-90s all the way through to the early 2010s, this change is coming so late that it should only actually affect a statistically insignificant number of Steam users. Valve already pulled Steam support for all versions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 in January 2024, and 2021’s Windows 11 was the first in decades not to ship a 32-bit version. That leaves only the 32-bit version of Windows 10, which is old enough that it will stop getting security updates in either October 2025 or October 2026, depending on how you count it.
According to Steam Hardware Survey data from August, usage of the 32-bit version of Windows 10 (and any other 32-bit version of Windows) is so small that it’s lumped in with “other” on the page that tracks Windows version usage. All “other” versions of Windows combined represent roughly 0.05 percent of all Steam users. The 64-bit version of Windows 10 still runs on just over a third of all Steam-using Windows PCs, while the 64-bit version of Windows 11 accounts for just under two-thirds.
The change to the Steam client shouldn’t have any effects on game availability or compatibility. Any older 32-bit games that you can currently run in 64-bit versions of Windows will continue to work fine because, unlike modern macOS versions, new 64-bit versions of Windows still maintain compatibility with most 32-bit apps.