Bad news if you’re one of the handful of people using Steam to play games on a Chromebook: Google and Valve are preparing to end support for the still-in-beta ChromeOS version of Steam on January 1, 2026, according to 9to5Google. Steam can still be installed on Chromebooks, but it now comes with a notice announcing the end of support.
“The Steam for Chromebook Beta program will conclude on January 1st, 2026,” reads the notification. “After this date, games installed as part of the Beta will no longer be available to play on your device. We appreciate your participation in and contribution to learnings from the beta program, which will inform the future of Chromebook gaming.”
Steam originally launched on Chromebooks in early 2022 as an alpha that ran on just a handful of newer and higher-specced devices with Intel chips inside. A beta version arrived later that year, with reduced system requirements and support for AMD CPUs and GPUs. Between then and now, neither Google nor Valve had said much about it.
The Steam beta was one component of a “gaming Chromebook” push that Google made in 2022 and 2023. It saw the release of laptops with better hardware and high-refresh-rate screens and optimized versions of GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Google had reportedly been working to add Steam support to ChromeOS since at least 2020.
