Stem will stop working on Chromebooks on 1 January 2026

Google has officially announced that the Steam beta for Chromebooks will stop working on 1 January 2026. After this date, all games installed through this store will stop working.

A bit of history

Steam for ChromeOS was released in March 2022. Few people remember it now, but at that time, there were plans to launch Steam cloud gaming, so the idea of playing on a Chromebook did not seem so absurd.

Speaking of absurd, it is better to remember that some manufacturers have released gaming Chromebooks. Even then, this idea looked doomed, because ChromeOS is based on Linux, which cannot boast of a large baggage of games. In addition, ChromeOS itself does not allow you to run native Linux applications, limiting you to web applications.

Why it is being closed

The active development of Steam for ChromeOS was stopped very quickly. The fact that the service never reached a stable release was a wake-up call. Steam cloud gaming also failed to develop into a full-fledged commercial product. And Google eventually decided to allow Android apps to run on Chromebooks and announced that it would merge the two platforms in the future. So Steam for ChromeOS was quietly waiting to be officially shut down, never leaving the beta stage.