Steam for Chromebooks is headed to Beta

At this point, Steam on ChromeOS has been in the works for well over two years but Google has been hesitant to announce any official timeline on when the project will fully go public. Personally, I am 100% okay with that. While I’m excited to see Steam gaming come to Chromebooks, I want to see it done well out of the gate. The success of Steam for ChromeOS isn’t going to make or break the Chromebook ecosystem but it could, if done properly, result in a massive expansion of the platform as a whole.

We have talked often about when Steam for ChromeOS would make its next move and become more widely available. My gut feeling has always pointed to a Beta testing period at some point during the last quarter of this year and possibly a full rollout somewhere around Q2 of 2023. Perhaps something around the same time as Google I/O announcing that Steam for ChromeOS will soon be out of Beta and available to the public. Even now, Google is preparing to expand the eligible devices that can run Steam and it will open the door to a massive amount of new potential testers.

Up until this point, trying out Steam on a Chromebook required not only a supported device but also meant taking your device into the sometimes unstable Developer Channel of ChromeOS. Thanks to a recent discovery by 9to5Google’s Kyle Bradshaw, it appears that this could be changing sooner than later. According to the commit, Steam on ChromeOS could be entering the Beta testing phase soon and as such, will also be promoted to the Beta Channel for supported devices.

borealis: Allow borealis to run on the beta branch

When borealis enters the beta development phase we will allow compatible chromebooks on the beta channel to install it.

The commit is active and has yet to be merged which means that it isn’t live in the Beta Channel at this time. However, the comments attached to the commit make it appear that things are good to go apart from a minor bit of semantics in one of the notifications that are triggered when you attempt to install Steam on your Chromebook. Apart from that, it looks like this update is in a holding pattern until Google is ready to move Steam into Beta. When that will be is anyone’s guess but I’d bet that we can expect to hear something soon as we roll into Q4 of 2022. Giving users access to Steam in the Beta Channel will give Google and Valve a broader test bed for dialing in the user experience and allow game developers to pinpoint any bugs or updates that may be needed to take Steam on ChromeOS into the next phase. Stay tuned for more on Steam for ChromeOS as it develops.

Source: 9to5Google