Google to kill Steam for Chromebook beta in 2026 — Installed games will 'no longer be available to play'

Google has just announced that it will end its Steam for Chromebook Beta program on January 1, 2026, with devices losing access to installed games on that date. According to 9to5Google, you can still install Steam on your Chromebook through the ChromeOS Launcher, but it will show a warning saying that support for the service is ending soon.

“The Steam for Chromebook Beta program will conclude on January 1st, 2026. After this date, games installed as part of the Beta will no longer be available to play on your device,” the warning says. “We appreciate your participation in and contribution to learnings from the beta program, which will inform the future of Chromebook gaming.”

Steam for Chromebook, launched in 2022, was designed to push mainstream gaming on ChromeOS devices. It came in the same year gaming Chromebooks entered the market, alongside the emergence of cloud streaming. Aside from that, Chromebooks support Android apps by default, including the numerous games available on the Google Play Store.

However, despite being in beta since November 2022, Steam for Chromebook never went into stable release. It seems that the service did not gain enough popularity for it to enter mainstream consciousness, even though it only has minimal specification requirements — an Intel Core i3 or an AMD Ryzen 3 CPU paired with 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage. Although these would allow cheaper Chromebooks to run it, they really weren’t good enough for most gamers who want to play the latest titles.

It also had a rather sparse library of just 99 games, while competing against the hundreds of thousands of titles on the Google Play Store. Although these are often designed for mobile devices, some of them offer an experience that rivals AAA PC games. And if you want to play a PC game that isn’t available on Android, GeForce Now lets you stream over 2,300 titles to your Chromebook.

Still, the imminent demise of Steam for Chromebook isn't strictly the end for gaming on Chromebooks. Google is working to combine Android and ChromeOS into one seamless operating system, and as mobile chips, like AMD’s Strix Halo line-up, become more powerful and come with integrated GPUs that can rival discrete graphics cards, it will not make sense for the company to ignore the gamer demographic.

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