Monster Hunter announcement points to wider problems for Windows 10 gamers on extended support

Capcom has made it clear that when Windows 10 reaches its imminent end-of-support deadline in mid-October, Monster Hunter games are also shuffling off into the realm of unsupported software.

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PC Gamer spotted Capcom's announcement on Steam, which states that the publisher will "no longer guarantee" that titles from the Monster Hunter franchise will run okay on Windows 10 going forward.

Capcom said:

"Monster Hunter: World, Monster Hunter Rise and Monster Hunter Wilds will still be possible to play on Windows 10 after October 14, 2025. However, future system updates or game title updates may make the game incompatible on Windows 10 systems."

In other words, Capcom's coders will be tinkering away and might break something for Windows 10 gamers, but they won't know that, because the Monster Hunter programmers will not be testing or checking these games on Windows 10.

If you stick on Windows 10 after the mentioned end of support deadline (October 14, 2025), and you run into a problem with a Monster Hunter game, you won't be able to get any help from Capcom. The publisher noted:

"Services for investigating problems regarding running the game on Windows 10 will be discontinued."

Not a surprise - but support is more complicated with Windows 10

Of course, this is not a surprise - as an operating system hits End of Life, game publishers (and others) naturally look to discard support, as it's a lightening of the workload of their programmers as they apply updates to existing titles.

However, in the case of Windows 10 and migrating to Windows 11, there's a muddying of the issue around end of support. By which I mean consumers can, for the first time ever, get a free year of updates thanks to Microsoft's Extended Security Updates (ESU) program.

Okay, so 'free' is a slightly loaded word in this case, but you don't have to pay any money for the extended year of Windows 10 support through to October 2026 - you only have to sync your PC settings to OneDrive (which isn't a massive sacrifice in my book - people in Europe don't even have to do this, either).

Given that, and the fact that quite a large number of people remain on Windows 10 - according to Steam, 35% of gamers still run the older Microsoft operating system, and that percentage is likely to stay relatively strong for another year due to that ESU - game publishers pulling the plug on support is a bit of a stinger.

That said, it's probably unlikely that something will be broken in the initial months following the end of support - but a spanner may well be thrown in the works at some point.

Nonetheless, we can expect more announcements like this from game makers, because technically, Windows 10 has indeed (almost) reached the official end of the road for support.

A PC Gamer points out, Square Enix has already made a similar announcement regarding support for Final Fantasy 14. In the next two weeks, expect to hear plenty more along these lines.