Summary
- The Steam for Chromebook Beta program will end on Jan. 1, 2026; games will no longer work after this date.
- Google aims to use beta lessons for future Chromebook gaming, but no specific plans yet.
- Gaming Chromebooks didn’t gain the desired user base, potential focus on game streaming ahead.
Google tried to make Chromebooks good for gaming, and its early efforts included everything from full-on RGB-decked Chromebooks to even Steam support, which, to be fair, wasn’t half bad. Now, though, the Steam part of the experiment is coming to an end.
Google is officially notifying users that the Steam for Chromebook Beta program is coming to an end on January 1st, 2026, right on New Year’s Day. In case you’re wondering, this is not “the beta is ending to give way to the stable version” either. The notification also clarifies that after this date, users will no longer be able to play their installed Steam games through the official client. Rather than doing a big announcement about this, the news is instead quietly delivered to users as a pop-up when they search for Steam in the ChromeOS launcher. It seems rushed to not even get a full six months from the first notice to the actual discontinuation date, especially seeing the implications—after all, any games you’ve installed through Steam will immediately stop working on your Chromebook.
Steam first landed on Chromebooks back in 2022, around the same time as Google’s initial push to launch gaming Chromebooks started. Three years later, though, it hasn’t even lost the “Beta” tag that was attached to it, even as it now works pretty well. It likely didn’t achieve the user base Google hoped it would get, which is not exactly unsurprising either—while the gaming Chromebooks have bells and whistles such as high-refresh rate displays, other Chromebooks are… well, just Chromebooks. A lot of them are not bad, but they aren’t exactly gaming-grade hardware unless all you want to do is play light games and indie titles.
Google hinted that this is not necessarily a complete withdrawal from gaming on Chromebooks. The company stated it will use the “lessons learned during this beta” to “inform the future of Chromebook gaming.” However, it offered no concrete details on what this future might entail. If I’m left to guess, Google will probably gear its efforts more towards game streaming if anything—services like NVIDIA GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming are frequently used on Chromebooks via both native apps and the Chrome browser itself. Of course, you’ll also be able to play Android games through the platform’s support for Android apps, though these are mobile-optimized games and not exactly the same grade of game you’ll get from a service like Steam.
It was nice while it lasted. If you’re using Steam on your Chromebook, start making arrangements to move your games to another platform.
Source: 9to5Google via Liliputing