Game over: Chrome OS pulls the plug on Steam gaming
TL;DR Steam on Chrome OS support began as a beta test in early 2022.
After graduating to a beta later that year, progress slowed down.
Now users are being informed that the beta is slated to end as 2026 gets started.
Choosing a Chromebook over a standard PC laptop can make sense for a lot of good reasons, from wanting to take advantage of the platform's track record of security, to just hoping to save some money on affordable hardware. But one pro we rarely see on that list is 'good for gaming.' Over the past few years, though, there's been the hope that the gaming landscape on Chrome OS could be getting a lot better, and one area with a ton of potential was support for Steam and its vast library of games. Sadly, it now look like that effort will never have the chance to leave beta.
Steam support on Chrome OS has been in an experimental stage for years now, first arriving as an early alpha back in 2022. You needed a decently powerful Chromebook, and getting it up and running was bit more complicated than installing your standard app, but in the end it worked, and made Chromebooks feel a heck of a lot more premium.
Well, fast-forward to this week, and it's just bad news all around for Steam on 'exotic' platforms. Just the other day Valve shared that it was ending Steam support on older Mac OS release, and now 9to5Google has spotted that Steam support on Chrome OS has ticking clock attached to it.
Users attempting to install the Steam beta on a Chromebook are now being presented with a message informing them of plans to wind the beta down at the end of the year — and not in the good 'beta graduating to a stable build' way, either. Instead, you'll no longer be able to play your Steam games on a Chromebook at all once 2026 rolls around.
While this is undeniably bad news for Chrome gaming, users still have several other options available to them. Chromebook owners can always install Android games, certainly, and with emulators on Chrome you can run your favorite titles from retro platforms. And if you're craving something a little more beefy and modern, you can always tap into cloud gaming through a service like Amazon Luna, NVIDIA GeForce Now, or Xbox Cloud Gaming.
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