Google announces Steam alpha for Chrome OS, finally making it a real gaming platform
It’s been over two years since Android Police initially revealed thatSteam was in the worksfor a Chrome OS release. In that time, we’ve seen incremental changes thatshowed againandagainthe feature was getting ever closer to release. You’d think an update as big as this would merit some sort of celebration, a major announcement from Google in partnership with Valve. Instead, the feature got a tossed-off remark at today’s gaming-focused developer summit, officially marking the arrival of real games for Chrome OS.
At the 2022Google for Games Developer Summit, a presenteroffhandedly announced the Steam for Chrome OS alpha program, declaring it as having “just launched.” That said, it doesn’t seem like it’s actually available on the web just yet. As a tweet from Ron Amadeo pointed out, Google has pointed users to theChromebook community forumsto learn more, though it has yet to be updated with information on installing.
That said, we do know what devices it’ll be running on when it’s officially accessible later today.A list of supported modelsmade the rounds last month, along with some more generic requirements. You’ll need an 11th-gen Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and 8GB of RAM to run Steam, which pushes most budget laptops out of the conversation entirely.
As with any program this early in testing, expect a ton of bugs whenever Steam for Chrome OS does go live for users. You’ll have to be running on either Chrome OS Dev or Canary builds and have the Borealis flag enabled for your machine. We’ll have more information on how to get Steam up and running on your machine once Google officially announces more details on its forums.
UPDATE: 2022/03/15 16:21 EST BY WILL SATTELBERG
“Coming soon”
Google might’ve referred to Steam for Chrome OS as having “just launched,” but it seems that language was a bit premature. According to apost on the Chromebook community forums, Steamisheaded to the platform — just not as soon as you might’ve hoped:
As you may have already heard, our team is working with Valve to bring Steam to Chrome OS. We are very excited to share that we’ll be landing an early, alpha-quality version of Steam on Chrome OS in the Dev channel for a small set of Chromebooks coming soon. Please come back to the forum for more information!
“Coming soon” doesn’t tell us much information on when we can expect Steam to land for supported devices, but hey, it’s better than nothing. For now, die-hard Chrome OS fans will have to stay satisfied with the library of apps and games on the Play Store — though hopefully, an alpha launch isn’t too far off.
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