Kan Liu, the Director of Product Management for Chrome OS, says Google is working to bring Steam support to Chrome OS
Last week at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, I spoke with Kan Liu, Director of Product Management for Google's Chrome OS. In a wide-ranging discussion about the Chrome platform …
Context & Ripple Effects
This January 2020 interview with Kan Liu is the origin point of a five-year arc the corpus traces in full: Chrome OS had already shed its browser-only identity when Google brought Android apps and the Play Store to the platform in 2016, and Liu's CES remarks extended that playbook to PC gaming via Steam.
What came after gives the announcement its weight: Valve shipped the Steam alpha on select high-end Chromebooks in March 2022, Gaming Chromebooks followed — and Google has now scheduled Steam for Chromebooks to stop working on January 1, 2026, closing the experiment this interview opened.
First-order effects
- The announcement commits Google to a gaming-capable Chromebook tier, since the later alpha required high-performance hardware — pushing Chrome OS beyond budget education devices toward machines that compete with Windows laptops on specs.
Second-order effects
- Valve gains a distribution surface outside Windows for the first time in this corpus, while Chrome OS's Windows-app story — the Parallels partnership Cyrus Mistry described in August 2020 — becomes a parallel track for enterprise apps alongside Steam's consumer-gaming track.
Third-order effects
- The full arc — 2020 commitment, 2022 alpha, 2026 shutdown — shows platform bets of this kind running on alpha-stage validation: Google launched Gaming Chromebooks on the back of an experiment it later retired, a pattern buyers of that hardware category now have to price in.
The trend: Chrome OS's expansion beyond the browser — Play Store, Windows apps, Steam — advanced in alpha-stage increments that Google validated with hardware partners before withdrawing, making gaming the latest such bet to be unwound.