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Comment by jordanmoconnor | Hacker News Reader

Neat - but who’s gaming on a Chromebook?

Probably the millions of people who own/have access to one and don't have the ability to buy another computer.

I guess I was initially thinking more resource intensive games, but there are lots of smaller games that a Chromebook could handle.

While this was not stated in the linked post, other sources said it will be limited to x86 chromebooks that run 11th+ gen Intel CPUs or equivalent.

That basically limits it to models that cost >800$ making it a very niche product.

Here's to hoping this is just a starting point, might be that it's a lot easier to support these models.

Probably not since it requires an 11th gen i5 or better chrome book https://www.androidcentral.com/steam-for-chrome-os-supported...

This is whats frustrating to me. We're talking a small slice of most chromebooks out there.

I actually have used old chromebooks with crouton to install steam and play games. You have to pick "lightweight" games like Baldurs Gate, but it still opens up a lot of possibility.

So I had hoped maybe something could be brought to old hardware, but I guess not.

I think you start by targeting the platforms with more horsepower and can move down over time. Obviously they might just not do that work and stay on the high powered ones, but I don't think it's a given.

The lower specs you allow, the more likely you’re to hit poor user experiences that piss users off.

It's a small slice today, but today's high-end computers are tomorrow's cheap used machines, and future budget machines will be more powerful than present high-end ones.

Thank you, you took a dour thought of mine and turned it into a very hopeful one.

When travelling, I have used GeForce Now to play Fortnite on an a pretty weak ARM Chromebook from a web browser.

I was able to turn up the graphical settings up much higher than what my regular desktop's ageing GTX 970 graphics card can get, while still maintaining a high frame rate.

Latency is low enough to have fun and contribute to the team. Wasn't a good experience over cellular, but it was very good on a wired connection.

I was very happy to have had a streaming option available at the time.

I am! Though I've been using Stadia + Chromebook when traveling. As for runnig games locally: I'm not sure if most Chromebooks have adequate GPUs to run recent AAA games, but I'm guessing that's a small portion of most people's Steam catalog.

I am a hardcore PC gamer.. but last Christmas I was at the in-law's place and we had a blast trying out a bunch of stadia pro offerings. So much so that I seriously considered buying FIFA on stadia. I just think there's too much of occasional lag on cloud gaming which makes it only suitable for casual gaming.

You'd be surprised the saturation in the 12-18 year old market. So many parents bought their kids chrome books.

I was a "only have a Macbook Air" person for a while. You end up sticking to small indie things, but there's lots of games that work on the old integrated graphics stack, available on Steam.

Plenty of great little indie games that would work.

Or older games, for that matter.

Steam streaming will probably work?

Ah, didn’t know that was a thing. Not unlike Stadia?

It’s streaming from one of your own computers, not one owned by Valve.

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