Steam, the new Next Fest arrives in the summer

Steam

Valve has announced that its next Next Fest will take place in June. This is a week dedicated to games coming out on the platform that will take place through various events in what is called a celebration of the upcoming games. It is not the first time that Steam has organized such events with the latest edition of the Next Fest which was held between 21 and 28 February 2022.



Steam valve The festival arises as a sort of virtual showcase for developers who, through their demos, will be able to showcase the products they are working on. In the February edition, 628 trial versions were added to the Steam catalog during the Next Fest. This demonstrates how we can expect great news from this event. The titles shown in the latest edition have seen the presence of both large projects and small jobs.




The June edition of the Next Fest will start at 19:00 on 13 June 2022 and will continue until 20 June. There are still no details on the titles that will be shown during the event but, given the precedents of the last edition, with titles such as Pandemic Train, McPixel 3 and the very Italian Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle, it seems likely that Steam can give us a very interesting week .

If you need a controller for Steam, try the Xbox One controller, available on Amazon

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Steam for Chrome OS Alpha hands-on: We're halfway there

Gaming on Chromebooks up to this point has been a compromise on top of awkwardness on top of half-measures. I say this on someone who has 'gamed' on every Chromebook she's owned for the last four years — the only games I trusted to play properly on Chrome OS were casual games like Microsoft Solitaire Collection. This is why even before Google confirmed it was working with Steam on Chrome OS, it had been a rumor, a prayer that Chrome users had begged and dreamed of for years and years.

Well, wake up and smell the dev channel, my friends. Thanks to the opening of the Steam on Chrome OS Alpha test, you can install and play Steam games on your Chromebook — but only on a handful of premium Chromebooks. Even then, you'll probably swap back to whatever console or PC you've been gaming on so far in less than three hours.

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This is indeed an alpha test, and here be dragons, especially for the overall best Chromebooks on the market today.

Installation, setup, and eye strain

Switching over to the Dev channel and getting Steam up and running took less than 15 minutes, most of which was downloading and installing the Dev version of Chrome OS. Once you've enabled the Borealis flag and put the token into the crosh command line — if you don't know what either of those are you might want to follow our Steam for Chrome OS installation guide — installing Steam itself is literally two clicks.

Even if you've never used it, getting started with Steam is a breeze — when you can read the text, that is. One of the first two 'known issues' on the Chromium page for Steam on Chrome OS Alpha is 'Devices with display resolutions greater than 1080p may encounter performance and scaling issues.'

The 13.5-inch, 400-nit, 2K (2256 x 1504-pixel) touchscreen on the Acer Chromebook Spin 713 has thus far been a point of pride for the series, but until this bug is fixed, Spin 713 owners will have to squint or pull out a magnifying glass in order to see regular text on the Steam store. And before you ask, no, external monitors don't help ('External monitors are not supported and have unexpected behavior'), and no matter how you crank your Display size up, Steam's text size will not see any appreciable change.

Forget those letter posters, how close you have to lean in to actually read the test is a true vision test.

This teeny size problem has so far only impacted the Steam store. Every game I've downloaded and tried loads at a normal size all touch targets are accurate so long as you keep the game in fullscreen mode. If you try to make the window smaller so you can see your cheat codes or see the time, you can develop a gap between where you mouse over an element and what it's actually clicking, but that's the kind of bug I expect to be addressed in the coming months.

If you have anything less than perfect vision, prepare yourself for an eye strain the first time you get Steam installed and get all your games downloaded. That said, the bigger hardware-related limiters aren't the display or the lack of dedicated GPU support; it's something much more basic.

Chromebooks need more RAM and storage, especially for Steam on Chrome OS

Name two programs that eat resources more than Chrome and Steam. I'll wait.

If we've said it once, we've said it a thousand times: Chromebooks don't get the RAM respect they deserve. 8GB is the minimum RAM requirement for Steam on Chrome OS Alpha, but it's straight-up not enough for anything graphic and action-intensive. I loaded The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt just to see if it'd run, and it did — just not well.

Steam only has the Windows version of The Witcher 3 — and a great many other triple-A titles. These games can only be installed using Steam Play, Steam's name for the compatibility layers like Proton, and while this allows us to play games that would otherwise be unavailable, it's yet another running underneath of an already impressively resource-intensive game.

The result: it even lagged on the opening scene a couple of times, and whenever I'd try and reposition the camera, things would stutter horribly while the laptop tried to catch up. That was just with me trying to get out of the damn castle: no combat, barely any NPCs around. In Steam on Chrome OS Alpha's defense, they do say upfront that you should only play with an i7 on something like the ASUS Chromebook CX9, but even then, you'll still have to crank graphics and post-processing down to low.

So if you're expecting to just load up Halo Infinite and go nuts, let me pop that bubble real quick. Even with an i7 and 16GB of RAM, things aren't seamless yet — after all, it's an Alpha test — but the more people who play and report issues, the faster they get fixed.

Want to try AAA games on Steam on Chrome OS? Grab the ASUS Chromebook CX9.

While I'd love to download every game on the list and give them all a spin, that brings us to the next hurdle: internal storage. Granted, all the Chromebooks starting off the Steam on Chrome OS Alpha have at least 128GB of SSD storage, but when you're dealing with games that can be over 30GB each — you need a data diet, Witcher — that space dwindles quickly.

No current Chromebook can overcome these; we'll have to wait for the next generation of Chromebooks to arrive with at least 16GB RAM and at least 256GB storage with 512GB and 1TB options widely available. After one full day and night, Steam on Chrome OS Alpha has eaten half my 256GB hard drive. They'll also need dGPUs and/or support for external GPUs, which will have to be built into future boards.

In-game performance varies wildly — but battery drain is constant

While I'd love to say I dove into 12 hours of Arkham or Elder Scrolls to stress test it, I instead went a little more civilized for my stress test: 12 hours straight of Civilization V. While not a very action-packed game, after 200 turns and over a thousand years of civilization-building, there were so many units and cities on the map that the map would start to lag every time I'd move between areas, and then the map would move and re-render terrain and everything else after a couple of seconds.

I went back and took it up another 60 rounds, and it just keeps getting more pronounced. While this is not great news for Civ players looking to control all the luxury goods, it helps demonstrate the limits of how much Steam on Chrome OS Alpha can handle on the hardware configuration most users have: an i5 and 8GB of RAM. Significant lag in open-world games like Witcher 3 was instantly noticeable — but things slightly improve for these games after several minutes.

When Witcher 3 first installs and launches, it spends about ten minutes setting up shader libraries, and that's not completely done by the time you start playing. Both of our Chrome OS gurus Kent Duke and Luke Short noticed on several games that games needed several minutes to get the shader cache populated, then things would even out (as much as your hardware allows).

Cranking down the graphics and other features can improve consistency, too, making thousands of games almost flawless if you don't have graphical issues of a 2K screen. Lower resolution games like Catan Creators Edition played like a champ, with a rare stutter now and then after spending two hours building up resources, but otherwise perfect.

Well, perfect except for tying you down to a charger. Steam on Chrome OS will eat your Chromebook's battery alive. My Acer Spin 713 usually averages about 6-8 hours of active use before it cries for a charger. Running Steam games — even relatively resource-light ones like Catan — my time away from a charger was cut in half.

Gaming is energy-intensive — especially when you're dealing with integrated graphics and not a dedicated GPU — and part of this drain can be attributed to a lack of optimization in the Alpha. Most Chromebook owners are used to going the whole day without charging and just topping up overnight, though, and you'll want to stay near a charger. In fullscreen mode, you won't see the indicator draining or a battery alert until that panic-inducing '2% battery, 5 minutes left' critical notification finally pops up.

Good, but not good enough anymore

You also won't charge at top speed while playing: using a 45W charger, recharging from dead to full took twice as long. Even once the battery was full, my USB-C cables LED display showed the laptop still pulling 16-24W rather than the traditional 1-6W. As I sit here typing this while Steam is minimized with no game actually running, I've lost half my battery in 90 minutes and the battery indicator says it'll run dead in less than an hour.

On the bright side, this will likely spur the next generation of premium Chromebooks to upgrade the charging speeds significantly. Only a few Chromebooks currently support 65W charging while most are still at the same 45W they adopted when Power Delivery first came to Chromebooks.

Feedback is crucial, and you should give it each and every time

Whether you just play one game religiously or you try out your entire Steam library, Google wants your feedback. Every time you close or quit a game, you'll get a notification begging for your thoughts, and you should answer it every time. It's not time-sensitive; I've answered a couple the next morning after gaming till 0330.

The game and your system/email are already pre-loaded, and by rating your gameplay experience every time, the team can see if performance is improving as they continue to tweak things. You can also click multiple options from a dozen issues (and a couple praises), enter other bugs, and write comments about what didn't work properly — or if it worked just fine out of the gate.

Steam on Chrome OS Alpha is already off to a fairly decent start, so long as you're willing to take some lag and crashes in stride. If your compatible Chromebook is your only laptop, I recommend against putting it on the Developer channel as it's where new features and bug 'fixes' often get tested. Dev channel is prone to some major issues like being totally locked out by a bad update or having to re-image your laptop after something gets corrupted, so if you're reliant on it for school or work, wait until Steam on Chrome OS comes to the Beta channel.

Samsung, please copy Apple and bring back phone subscriptions

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About The Author

Ara Wagoner (10 Articles Published)

Ara is Commerce Editor for Android Police and a lover of all things theming, customization, and accessorizing. After seven years of writing how-tos, buyer's guides, and reviews at Android Central, Ara brings a unique flair to her writings (and a lot of Disney references). When she's not writing, she's running around Walt Disney World with her trusty shoulder holster and a Key Lime Dole Whip. If you see her without headphones, run.

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