Riot finally kills LoL on Windows 7 & 8.1 and Microsoft is to blame
After patch 14.4, the game won't work on older versions of Windows
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League of Legends has millions of players worldwide, and until the recent patch, it was available on almost any version of Windows.
Sadly, that’s no longer the case, and Riot Games has dropped support for Windows 7 as well as Windows 8 in its entirety.
League of Legends bids farewell to Windows 7 and 8.1 support following the latest patch
Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 have reached their end of life, and Microsoft is no longer fixing bugs or security flaws.
Steam has dropped support for Windows 8.1 as well as Google, and now Riot Games and League of Legends are following suit.
This isn’t anything new, and we already saw a post on the Riot Games Support Page stating that the game won’t run on older operating systems to align with the list of Microsoft’s supported products.
The new Patch 14.4 is here, and it brings balance changes, as well as various bug fixes and quality improvements. Of course, support for Windows 7 and 8.1 is no longer here, and here’s what patch notes say:
As of this patch, our minimum system requirements have been updated and we will no longer be supporting Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 for all League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics games.
To maintain the stability and performance of our games, we sometimes need to deprecate support for legacy operating systems that aren’t widely used by our players
This comes as no surprise since Windows 7 and 8.1 are losing popularity, as we can see from Windows 11 market share in 2023.
Maintaining the game for unsupported systems requires extra effort by the developers, so we can’t blame Riot Games for doing this.
If you’re on Windows 7 or 8.1, your only option is to upgrade if you want to continue playing. Reddit users managed to run League on 8.1 using the 10.0 kernel, but this requires using an informal build and it’s not a reliable solution.
On the bright side, RIOT is working on a new game called 2XKO, so that’s something to get excited about.
What are your thoughts on this? Will you upgrade to Windows 10 to continue playing LoL? Let us know in the comments!
