the Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems. This is the official

statement and amongst retro gamers this has been known for some time now. Looking

at the Steam hardware survey only 0.11% are using Windows XP as their

operating system, so on paper this affects only a very small group of steam

customers but in the retro PC gaming community this is certainly sad news. I

guess we always knew the day would come, but just not that soon. For example

on this channel I didn't even get a chance to do anything with Windows Vista

yet, so not having access to my Steam games will make creating such content

definitely more difficult. So in this video I want to spread the word and show

you a few ways that I use to prepare myself for when steam stops working with

Windows XP. Now I won't exactly walk you through how you can crack your Steam

games, but I'll leave enough breadcrumbs for anyone that is interested and

motivated enough to be able to figure it out through a bit of online searching.

I'm also very eager to hear what you think and what you are going to do. In

the background we are playing some Far Cry on a PC I quickly put together. We

have an i7 4770k, a GTX 750 Ti and 4 Gigabytes of DDR3 1600 memory in dual

channel configuration. Security issues and cost to support the Steam client for

Windows XP are often mentioned, but here's the thing as a retro PC gamers we

don't actually require ongoing support we just don't want to be locked out of

our games. For example look at Windows 98 or the game POD. Both are not supported

anymore but that doesn't stop us from putting together a Windows 98 retro

gaming PC and playing that game. But with steam, playing most of your games

is tied to online Digital Rights Management. Now I've seen many online

discussions about hoping for a legacy client to make them

work on Windows XP, but I seriously doubt that this will happen

although, hope does die last. I also often read that there's no point in having a

dedicated Windows XP retro gaming PC because all games work on Windows 10.

Well that simply isn't true at all, there are many games that give issues with newer

versions of Windows. Sure often there are workarounds and

guides you can follow to get them to work but why should ask customers have

to fix these games ourselves and those games do work straight out of the box on

Windows XP without any issues. So on the one hand these games will stop working

on machines that will run them flawlessly but on the other hand the

games are left broken on modern machines and I do wonder if they will actually

get removed from Steam or will we see patches. Either way I guess we will find

out soon. We all have retro memories of buying a boxed copy of a certain game,

unpacking it and having a look at all the goodies inside. Well I have similar

memories of buying certain Steam games. For example in 2010 I was working in a

computer sales role and we had this incentive or commission going on with

prepaid credit cards as a reward. I saved up enough of these to put together a

budget gaming PC. I believe it had an Ahtlon IIX2 and geforce 9600 GT and I

vividly remember picking up games during the Steam Christmas sales, great games

like Bioshock, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Stalker, so when I think of Bioshock

for example it takes me back to that time staying up late night to wait for the

next round of flash sales and playing it through Steam. So let's talk about some

of the things I'm doing to prepare myself. Firstly you can get games from

GOG. I've got around 500 games from GOG and they have a good selection of games

from the Steam library. For example F.E.A.R., Crysis, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, X2 Serious

Sam and Return to Castle Wolfenstein are some examples and with GOG we can see

the difference between not supporting something but not locking you

out either. The GOG client, which is called Galaxy, it doesn't run under

Windows XP as well, however GOG lets us download the installer of any game you

own. You can save them onto a USB hard drive and then install them onto your

Windows XP Retro Gaming PC without even connecting to the internet. But there's

no denying that the Steam library is much larger and has more games available

than GOG. I only discovered this recently but a lot of Steam games are actually

DRM free, meaning you can just copy the game folder onto another machine and

they will run just fine without Steam. We have a few heavy hitters here from Valve

themselves: Half-Life 2 with both Episodes as well as the Lost Coast

benchmark. We've got Portal and also Half-Life

Source. These are all DRM free, at least for the moment.

There's also GT legends and GTR 2 that worked great for me without Steam. There

are many other DRM free games but many are lesser-known titles that I don't

find very interesting. For MS-DOS fans there's also good news: many games use

DOSBox and these are also DRM free, in fact you can copy them onto a real retro DOS

PC and they will work just fine. Most games however will not run without Steam

being present. Now I know that some out there are downloading the entire Steam

library on a retro PC and then taking an image of those games so that they will

continue working in offline mode. This sounds like a solid plan, but you never

know if suddenly steam insists on connecting online and locking you

out again. So for such games what you can do is find a cracked executable or a

No CD patch and that lets you launch the game without Steam. I'm only starting

to go through my list of Windows XP era games, but so far I'm having good success.

Games such as Tomb Raider Legends and Anniversary, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

and Call of Duty now work without Steam. And another option is finding a program

that can emulate or fake the Steam client. So guys there's no denying that

losing Steam on Windows XP really sucks. I understand

that it was just a matter of time but it's still a huge pain. But to be honest

I'm not too worried anymore, the retro PC gaming community we are really

resourceful and we will always find a way to play our old games. In a way it

forced me to find some of these workarounds and they will actually now

save me time when working on future videos. No need to install Steam. Just

copy the games and I'm set. So yeah guys do share your thoughts about this down

below in the comments. Are you ready for Steam not working on Windows XP and what

do you recommend. So there you have it guys we had a discussion about Steam and

how it will stop working on Windows XP and Windows Vista come 2019 and we also

had a discussion about a few workarounds. So yeah initially I was really upset

with the whole situation but now having learned about all these workarounds, yeah

it's not too bad anymore. Life goes on and like I said in the video we will

always find a way to play our games. So guys thank you so much for watching,

share your thoughts down below in the comments and I shall see you soon with

another one!