What you need to know
- Steam for Chrome OS was announced as being available "right now" at the Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15, 2022.
- This announcement appears to have been premature, with the actual release date still in the near future.
- A post in February showed that seven Chromebooks would support Steam when it eventually launched for Chrome OS
Today's Google for Games Developer Summit was chock full of announcements (opens in new tab), but none were as surprising as the apparent imminent launch of Steam for Chrome OS. During the "Gaming on Chrome OS" portion of the event, the keynote speaker said that Steam "just launched" for Chrome OS, giving way to a fevered frenzy of folks looking everywhere for the installer.
Turns out, this announcement appears to have been premature. Google PR confirmed to Android Central that Steam for Chrome OS isn't actually available today, March 15, but will be coming in the near future.
Back in February, we got our first look (opens in new tab) at the seven Chromebooks that should support Steam when it eventually launches for Chrome OS in the future. This first release looks to be considered an alpha release, which means that testers should expect to run into a significant amount of bugs initially.
Once Steam moves into beta, we fully expect many of the best Chromebooks (opens in new tab) to support Valve's gaming platform as it continues to expand to more and more platforms. Valve recently released the Steam Deck (opens in new tab), which is the company's first foray into the world of portable gaming consoles.
Steam Deck's Steam OS and Google's Chrome OS are both based on the Linux operating system, so it's not surprising to see Valve continue to expand to other Linux-based OS. While Valve has worked hard to ensure that Windows games can run on Linux-based OSs, we don't know how well these games will run on Chromebooks just yet.
