K9: I searched for topics, so if this was covered before, I didn't find it. As time goes on, new games are made for new operating systems. Fewer and fewer brand new games will work on Windows 10 until there are none. What about older games that ran on older OSes when they were first released? Will future GOG releases keep to those system requirements, running on 10, 7, XP, etc. as they originally did? Or will games be "remastered" and people forced to use Windows 11?
Every time a Windows OS reaches EOL, there's a huge amount of FUD on the issue:-
1. Windows 10's official end of support date is
14th Oct 2025 (Home / Pro / Education / Enterprise). However, W10 Enterprise LTSC is supported all the way through to
13th Jan 2032 (and that can run 100% offline if necessary). Despite Microsoft's own endless BS spiel that it's a
"special version for ATM's & MRI scanners" that's somehow "unsuitable" for general use, in reality it's just a regular W10 build (complete with Game Mode, DirectX12 and XBox services) with less bloat & telemetry that's been highly popular amongst gamers and makes the perfect 'Long Term Stable' computer in general. It's easily activated offline too.
2. Windows 7's "official" end of support date was 13th Jan 2015, yet in reality that got extended all the way through to 10th Jan 2023, a whopping +8 years. Even today Mozilla said they will support Firefox on W7
through to March 2025. The same will happen to W10 and MS are already discussing multi-year extensions. In theory you have to be a corporation that pays for them. In practise it took one person all of 3 days to create a simple utility that slipstreamed 2021-2023 ESU updates into regular consumer W7 ISO's, so expect the same with W10.
3. An OS reaching end of official support doesn't mean that existing games working on current hardware will stop working on same hardware. Look at the various retro-rigs out there with Youtuber's like
LGR still installing Win 98, NT4, etc, on hardware of the era. Worst case, you want to remain on W10 for the next 30 years offline = just buy a couple of spare CPU & Motherboards of the newest hardware generation that's W10 compatible and that's your future "retro-rig" built in advance. :-)
4. An OS reaching end of official support doesn't mean that new games won't work on an older OS for quite a few years. Look at the
Does it Run on W7 thread here to see reduced compatibility is an ongoing process that has taken almost a decade (2024 vs 2015) just to see an increase in titles that don't work and people are still reporting many 2024 titles work fine. Games usually only stop working due to a combination of gradual adoption of new API's (eg, no DX10 on XP, no DX12 on W7) and newer versions of Unity / Unreal engines being compiled to make Kernel calls that are specific to new OS's. And even then there are often workaround, eg, Myst (2021) didn't work on W7 due to defaulting to DX12 API, however start the game with -dx11 command line switch and it worked with no problem. And to give a sense of perspective, the newest .NET 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, etc, Runtime dependencies also still work on W7, and DirectX versioning itself has significantly slowed down with many games still coming as DX11 as the norm despite DX12 now being 9 years old, so W10 has a long way to go with MS themselves legally guaranteeing they'll have to make the next 8 years of Visual Studio dependencies W10 compatible anyway due to LTSC.
5. An OS reaching end of official support doesn't mean that an older OS won't work on newer hardware for a few generations. Microsoft has churned out a lot of FUD of how 6th gen (Skylake) Intel was the last supported for W7. Back in the real world, people are running W7 on
12th Gen Intel / Ryzen 5000's just fine. And the difference between W10 vs W7 (eg, W7 lacking DX12, GPU hardware scheduling, Resizeable BAR, out of the box NVMe / XHCI USB, UEFI Class 3 boot, SecureBoot, heterogenous CPU's (P vs E core awareness), WPA 3 authentication, Bluetooth 5, FIDO2, etc) is far greater than the difference between W11 vs W10 (basically all W10 is missing is 6GHz WiFi 6E/7 that most people don't even have a matching router for anyway) in terms of hardware compatibility / architecture.
6. 99% of security is common sense, and someone running an older OS that has a whitelisted firewall, sitting behind a router with its own firewall / NAT and its default password changed / remote access disabled and has actually taken the time to disable a load of backdoor crap that W11 keeps open as standard is probably a damn site more secure in practise than running MS's latest & greatest with its Secondary Logon, Remote Desktop Configuration, Remote Desktop Services, Remote Registry, Server, etc, services all enabled by default and its outgoing firewall wide open to let anything and everything to chatter away in the background but claim it's
"secure because I updated it and that's all that matters" (rolls eyes). It's also increasingly common to see "split usage", ie, rather than use one desktop PC for everything, people often use a phone / tablet / laptop / Chromebook for online banking / communications / secure stuff and just use the desktop for gaming, at which point for single-player offline games it really doesn't matter what OS you use.
tl:dr - W10 will be around anyway for another 8 years (LTSC) and if you want to stay on it, it's entirely feasible to do so. And even after 2032, it'll still work for most older games just as W7 and XP do today.
