A quarter of PC players are about to be locked out of FACEIT

FACEIT's own FAQ states the date in plain language: from 14 October 2026, Windows 11 is required to play on FACEIT. TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot were already mandatory from 25 November 2025, with IOMMU and virtualization-based security rolled out in waves. The primary source is the FACEIT Windows security FAQ.

The machines that requirement drops are not a rounding error. Valve's July 2026 Steam Hardware Survey put Windows 10 64-bit at 23.30% of reported systems, drifting down by about a quarter of a point a month. By 14 October that share is still near a fifth of the surveyed PC installed base. Steam's survey is a sample of Steam users, not a census of every esports player, and the share moves every month. It is still the best public number for how many PCs a Windows 11 rule turns away.

This is a ladder decision, not a law of physics. FACEIT can require a newer operating system because its anti-cheat wants the hardware features that come with it. A community organiser does not have to copy that rule to run a bracket. A school lab, a café, and a lot of older gaming PCs will still be on Windows 10 in October. An event that silently inherits FACEIT's requirement is an event that tells those players they cannot compete, without ever writing that down.

The honest limit of a user-mode check is the same limit every non-kernel client has: it cannot see everything a kernel driver can see. We do not claim otherwise. What an organiser can claim, if the client allows it, is that a player on Windows 10 is not refused at the door. The anti-cheat integration is built so the default client stays in user mode, and a kernel requirement is an operator choice for a specific event rather than a platform-wide lockout.

The same date does not apply to every title. Community scenes that never lived on FACEIT, including Team Fortress 2 events, are not the ones this rule closes. The lockout is the CS2 and similar ladders that adopted FACEIT's stack. If you run one of those ladders, 14 October is the day your eligibility rule either matches FACEIT or it doesn't. Write the rule down before the players find it by being rejected.