Google Ending Steam for Chromebook Support in 2026

Google will discontinue Steam for Chromebook Beta on January 1, 2026, removing all installed games from devices after that date. The beta launched in March 2022 as an alpha before expanding to beta status in November 2022 with reduced hardware requirements of Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 processors and 8GB RAM. The program never progressed beyond beta testing despite supporting 99 compatible Linux-based titles through its three-year run.

All two users

[Anonymous Coward]

will be very upset.

Wrong tool for the job anyway

[Powercntrl]

The other day on Reddit I saw someone post (and later deleted) that they were towing a 18' fiberglass boat with their Chevy Bolt. For context, the car does not have a tow rating. Gaming on a Chromebook is kind of like that. You can technically do it, but... it's not going to do it well, and you probably shouldn't.

Unless "gaming" means playing things like match-3 games and Minecraft with all the settings bottomed out. Which to bring back around to the car analogy, would be like me saying I found a practical way to haul around a "boat" with my Bolt by throwing an inflatable raft in the trunk.

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[tlhIngan]

Actually, Google was starting to segment chromebooks in various categories, and "gaming" was one of them where they would have a decent GPU. This was because many of the SoC powered chromebooks had a decent GPU in them that was way more than what you need for a web browser and video decoding.

Steam was thought of as a way to use some of the increasing GPU power available to chromebooks. These days, it's running the Android environment - Android apps pretty much all require using the GPU nowadays. And the And

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[ChunderDownunder]

What OS does Google use internally?

Because if you wanted to 'dog-food' you'd sternly encourage pretty much every employee to use Chrome OS, hence the Linux and Android containers, with the option to spin up a virtualized container for specialty work, including Windows 11 (whose support someone unofficially demoed on a Pixel phone.)

Steam OS then seemed like a perk for their employees but it's built on Wine, so as an incentive to get whatever Windows apps the company uses running sans W11.

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[G00F]

There is no requirement games need high end hardware!!!

and honestly since about 2008ish, games graphics in actualy game play while playing seem good enough. And the games I am seeing a lot of young people play are minecraft or lower graphic games. Even seeing pixil art or quake3ish engine in use by youtubers.

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[tlhIngan]

There is no requirement games need high end hardware!!!

Especially since it's impossible to get high end hardware today.

With Nvidia basically giving up making gaming GPUs in favor of AI cards, the top end 5000 series cards are basically never in stock.

AMD GPUs do not compete on the high end - AMD has said so.

The midrange cards costing $800 and under are still above MSRP - the low-mid range cards for $600 are still over MSRP but actually obtainable.

So a gaming PC pretty much has a budget GPU or a low-mid rang

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[drinkypoo]

I used to get pretty much all the cheap humble bundles unless I was completely uninterested in them, so I have a moderately sizable steam library, so I know there's plenty of games on steam which would run fine on a chromebook. They are all either old or indie (even vaguely modern versions of Bejeweled will cause the fans to spin up on your GPU at higher resolutions) but there's tons of games which would work fine.

Which then brings us to... there's way more than 99 of them. Probably most of them are visual

Oh No!

[kenh]

The beta launched in March 2022 as an alpha before expanding to beta status in November 2022

Say it isn't so - Google is cancelling a 3 year-old beta offering? Unbelievable!

fuck google

[invisiblefireball]

google needs to die as soon as possible, greedy evil shitheads

DRM, working as intended

[Waccoon]

So, they can't just have the client work in "offline mode" forever? They will forcibly delete all content?

This is why my gaming rig is a Win7 machine, and I pull the Ethernet cable every time I launch Steam. Steam throws a tantrum about not having a network connection, but amazingly I can still run my games. Good luck being able to do that in the future, when an Internet connection is mandatory just to power on your device, and any forced updates will brick all your content.

Giving up everything to transition to Android

[ThoolooExpress]

Y'all are drawing the wrong conclusions here, it's not that Google is totally giving up on gaming on ChromeOS (although it was a halfhearted effort at best), it's just that the underlying OS for ChromeOS is being transitioned to Android so they're abandoning everything that won't work on Android. At that point people can just play Android games, and Google can get a cut of all the sales through the Play Store.