Chromebooks are excellent for browsing the web, getting some work done, and even for entertainment. It offers long hours of battery life that can often last a full workday, and it has most of the functionality needed to focus on work, and help students complete their assignments.
According to a new commit made to the Chromium Gerrit (first spotted by Android Police), Steam may soon arrive to Chrome OS as a native app. The application has received the “Borealis” codename, and Valve is working on bringing the popular gaming platform to affordable Chromebook devices. Android Police says that special flags have been added to Chrome OS 98, allowing certain functionality, and we should also see some support in a future Canary release.
According to Android Police, Steam will be able to run that to the Linux compatibility that was added a while ago, and games will be compatible with the Proton. Proton itself is a compatibility layer developed by Valve that will allow Windows-based games to run on Linux operating systems. It’s unclear how well it will all work out, but fans and gamers have widely praised the system.
While it’ll be great to see Steam on affordable Chromebooks, it’s important to note that most Chromebooks are not capable of playing AAA titles, and the majority of the devices won’t even be able to play most games in low settings due to the low-end hardware. There are some higher-end devices that will be able to run certain software and titles with a great overall experience, but the majority will likely only be able to play less graphics-intensive games.
It’s great to see Steam coming to affordable Chromebook devices, but the majority of users will still be recommended to either play via a cloud-based gaming platform such as Stadia, or NVIDIA GeForce Now, since it’ll offer better performance and more enjoyable graphics.
