Steam Adds New Feature That Easily Allows Game Recording

Valve has pushed live a new feature in beta as part of Steam that implements game recording. Currently, the PC platform offers a wide variety of programs that can be used to record gameplay footage. However, many of these toolsets are a bit cumbersome to use and can provide various issues. Now, Valve is trying to streamline the process of capturing footage by making it an integral part of the Steam platform. 

Detailed in a new blog, Valve outlined its new Game Recording feature and how it works. In short, this toolset will allow users to capture footage of what they’re playing and then clip it or share it to various platforms all directly from Steam. Recording can happen constantly in the background of any game users might play but won’t ever exceed the storage restrictions that might be applied. Footage can also be easily sent to other devices, such as a smartphone, and can be easily exported as MP4 files as well. 

“Steam Game Recording has been designed with the goal of taking as little computer resources away from the game you are playing as possible,” Valve said of this new addition to Steam. “It takes advantage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards to remove most of the performance cost of creating video recordings. When run on systems without those graphics cards, the systems CPU is used to create video recordings which may cause a noticeable performance impact on those systems.” 

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Steam Game Recording is that it’s also compatible on Steam Deck. All of the aforementioned features of the Game Recording system are functional on Steam Deck in the same way that they are on PCs. This is a pretty major achievement for the Steam Deck as most competing handhelds aren’t able to natively record gameplay in this manner. 

As a reminder, Steam Game Recording is still only available in beta, which means that Valve still has some work to do in order to make this feature the best that it can be. Still, if you’d like to give this Game Recording feature a try for yourself, you can opt-in to the beta via the settings menu of Steam.