Dota 2 is dropping support for some older hardware in the coming months, including older 32-bit operating systems.
Dota 2 is dropping support for some older hardware in the coming months, including older 32-bit operating systems. As part of the announcement of the update to The International 10, Valve said they're dropping some of the legacy hardware Dota has ever supported. “To keep the game and the Source 2 engine fresh, we plan to remove support for some legacy systems and configurations. Nothing is changing today, but we will implement the following changes in the coming months.”
These changes include removing support for Dota on 32-bit systems, macOS versions below 10.14, DirectX 11 support in favor of DirectX 9, OpenGL support in favor of Vulkan, and XAudio support in favor of SDL Audio.
“Removing these legacy technologies will allow us to streamline our development efforts and use the newer features of these APIs to provide an even better Dota experience,” Valve's announcement says.
It's probably a calculated decision, given that Valve has access to a lot of information about what the average gaming hardware is through Steam hardware surveys. Microsoft started dropping sales of 32-bit Windows last year, but still supports existing installations so far. For comparison, macOS 10.14 was released in 2018.