Google Starts Running Steam on Chrome OS

Last week, Google mistakenly published a presentation confirming Steam support on Chromebook devices. In that slide there was mention of a website where people could read information about testing running Steam on Chrome OS, but no website was given.

Recently, information about Chromebooks being able to run Steam has been officially confirmed. Google also officially provides all the details you need to run Steam on Chrome OS. As expected, currently only certain Chromebooks are supported and it is only in the early stages of development. In other words, don’t expect everything to work perfectly because Google is still a work in progress.

Here are the Chromebook models that support Steam’s alpha beta:

– Acer Chromebook 514 (CB514-1W)

– Acer Chromebook 515 (CB515-1W)

– Acer Chromebook Spin 713 (CP713-3W)

– Acer Chromebook Flip CX (CX5500)

– Asus Chromebook CX9 (CX9400)

– HP Pro c640 G2 Chromebook

– Lenovo 5i-14 Chromebook

Note further that with the above Chromebooks, you need to configure Intel Core i5 processor or higher and RAM 8GB or more. If you have a Core i3 configuration and less than 8GB of RAM, you won’t be able to run Steam.

Next, you need to switch to the experimental Chrome OS version, the dev channel. You can follow Google’s instructions here to switch to experimental Chrome OS. Then follow these steps:

In the Chrome browser, go to chrome://flags#borealis-enabled and set the value to Enabled. Then you need to restart the machine. After rebooting, open the terminal by pressing the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + T. Enter the command insert_coin volteer-JOlkth573FBLGa and press Enter. Follow the steps to install Steam. Sign in to your Steam account and start playing.

At first, only certain games will work and there will be many errors and or problems during setup. Google will bring up a list of games that can already run on Steam for Chrome OS.

Google hopes Steam will get better and better as it exits alpha testing and moves into beta.

(Refer to Quantrimang)