Short Answer:
Not in any officially supported way anymore. Google ran a native Steam for Chromebook beta from 2022, but Google and Valve shut it down on January 1, 2026. The realistic way to play Steam-style games on a Chromebook today is cloud gaming through NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud Gaming, or Amazon Luna, all of which run beautifully on a Chromebook Plus.
Long Answer:
Steam's history on ChromeOS is a short but real one. In 2022 Google launched a native Steam beta, codenamed Borealis, that ran the actual Steam client inside a Linux container and used Valve's Proton compatibility layer to run Windows games. It worked, and on the right hardware it worked surprisingly well. The catch was always the hardware: the beta only ran on a narrow set of higher-end Chromebooks with enough CPU, RAM, and graphics muscle, and that pool of devices never grew large enough to make the project sustainable. In August 2025 Google and Valve announced they were winding it down, and on January 1, 2026 the beta ended. Steam installed through that program no longer runs, and there is no current replacement native client on the horizon.
If you are comfortable in a terminal you can still install the Linux desktop version of Steam yourself through the built-in Linux environment, since ChromeOS is Linux underneath. Be realistic about the results, though. Without the Borealis tuning, you are running Steam in a generic container with limited graphics acceleration, so you are mostly limited to older, lighter, or natively-Linux titles. It is a fun project for a tinkerer, not a path to smooth AAA gaming.
For everyone else, cloud gaming has quietly become the better answer anyway. Services like NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Amazon Luna run the game on a powerful server and stream the video to your Chromebook, which means even a modest fanless machine can play demanding titles as long as your internet connection is solid. GeForce NOW in particular ties into your existing Steam library, so the games you already own are playable without installing anything locally. Gaming used to be near the top of the list of things Chromebooks can't do well, but cloud gaming has closed most of that gap.
Recommended Chromebook for Gaming
If gaming is a priority, the Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE was purpose-built for cloud gaming. Its 16-inch 120Hz display, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port for low-latency streaming, and RGB gaming keyboard make it the most game-ready Chromebook you can buy. If you want to try ChromeOS before committing to new hardware, see our guide on installing ChromeOS on a Mac.
