Hey welcome back to the channel! All right so a little while ago I did a
video on reasons why to use a Chromebook, it got really good reception a lot of
questions came out of that and a lot of those questions revolved around gaming.
So that's what this video is gonna be about, this is gonna talk about
how to game on a Chromebook. Now I just want to start this off by saying that if gaming
is your primary focus a Chromebook is not what you want to get you're gonna
want to get a gaming machine for that this is for people that have Chromebooks
they like what they have to offer and they want to know how they can do some
casual gaming on the go now as usual I'll have links down in the
description to everything I talked about in this video and with all that out of
the way let's jump right into it so the first thing I want to talk about is
native gaming on Chrome OS and obviously these are gonna be web-based games you
could go out to the chrome store there's a ton of them out there these are really
lightweight casual games they do have stuff like the original doom got ported
so you can play that in Chrome OS if you want but most of them are gonna be kind
of strategy type games not real high action but a lot of them are really fun
and I definitely recommend that you go out there and check out what the chrome
store has to offer there's a ton of free stuff out there next up is Android apps
and pretty much any recent Chromebook is gonna have native support for Android
applications I tried a lot of the games that are in the Google Play Store pretty
much all of them worked in fact I can't think of one that didn't work some of
them have gamepad support some of them don't it's really easy to pair up a
gamepad to your Chromebook especially through Bluetooth or if your Chromebook
has a USB port like mine does you can just plug the wired controller in there
and use that even if the game doesn't have gamepad support you can still use
the touch screen and most current books are lightweight enough and small enough
that using that touch screen actually works out really well this is a really
great option because there are some near console quality games in the Google Play
Store so I would recommend that you go out there and try out those games and
see what runs well on your machine next thing I wanted to talk about is cloud
gaming and this is provided in a few different ways now one of those ways
requires you to have a client on your workstation and in the Google Play Store
there are a bunch of different Android clients that do work
chromebooks that connect out to different game streaming services now
the problem with those is there's a little bit extra latency when you're
running those Android apps versus connecting directly to the game server a
lot of them do provide gamepad support so whether you're using a wired or
wireless gamepad a lot of them support that but what they
don't usually support is mouse and keyboard so the next option is to find a
streaming service that lets you connect through a web browser now Google is
coming out with one later in the year I think it's supposed to be out in
November but until then I tried a few different ones and the one that I found
that works the best is vortex now vortex you sign up with a your account you can
link to your steam account and then you could play the games right in a web
browser nothing needs to be loaded on your machine the latency is very low it
was actually an enjoyable experience if you're doing something competitive
you're not going to want to do it this way
there is a tiny tiny bit of latency but for the average single-player game it
works just fine so for the cloud gaming there is a few other options one is an
application called parsec that you can load on your gaming machine load the
client on your Chromebook and stream your games from your own powerful gaming
machine you can also get gaming VPNs and load parsec on there and stream through
there that is much more complicated much more expensive if you go in the gaming
VPN route and if you're gonna end up going that route then you probably would
be better off with a gaming machine so it's beyond the scope of this video next
thing I wanted to talk about is something that didn't quite work out but
it's something that's coming in the future so I still wanted to mention it
and that is running Linux games natively in Chrome OS now most modern Chromebooks
and chromeboxes will have native support for Linux applications but the problem
is that there is no GPU acceleration up until recently there was no sound either
the sound issue has been resolved but there's still no graphics acceleration
so I even tried loading steam in there which worked fine but then streaming
from another machine to my Chromebook and I couldn't even stream because of
the lack of graphics acceleration once they get that resolved you'll be able to
do that and in theory load Linux games and load the Linux version of steam on
your Chromebook without doing anything extra and stream from another machine so
I'm really looking forward to that but like I said it's not quite there yet
because of that GPU acceleration so that's really everything I wanted to
talk about on the native side but there is another way to vastly improve the
library of games that are available on your Chromebook and that is with
installing Linux through something called crouton now I did a full tutorial
video I'll put a link right up here so I'm not going to talk about how to do
this you can check out that video it'll walk you through all the steps but once
you get that set up you can switch over into a Linux environment and load pretty
much any Linux game that your hardware will support and you can also install
steam and install Steam games through there you can do streaming from your
gaming computer through Steam link if if you so choose to do that it works really
well again most Chromebooks don't have a powerful GPU but this version of Linux
does have full sound full GPU acceleration etc etc it works really
well it's really solid and you can play a ton of games especially casual games
like rimworld oxygen not included things like that a
lot of the strategy games work if you're gonna do really graphical like you know
first-person shooters and stuff like that it's still doable but you're gonna
have to set all the settings way low but that is no different than a lower power
Windows laptop as well this works really well it's a great way to vastly expand
the library of games and applications that are available on your Chromebook so
that's all the ways I've personally found how to game on a Chromebook
but if you know of others please leave those down in the comments section below
also if you have any questions on anything I talked about leave that in
the comments section below too I try to answer as many comments as I can
hopefully you found this useful and informative if you did hit that thumbs
up if you really liked it you haven't subscribed yet please consider doing so
and I will see in the next video