Clips Or It Didn't Happen: Steam Has A New Game Recording Tool And It Supports Steam Deck

Steam users are now able to try out its new system, called Game Recording, for creating and sharing gameplay footage that’s built right into the Steam overlay. There are several ways for gamers to capture in-game moments, from recording entire game campaigns to recording select clips. It’s also a breeze to share these moments with several options available to get the footage out into the wider world. This new feature will be available on both desktop and Valve's popular Steam Deck handheld.

Game Recording will be available in two different ways. The first is “record in background,” where Steam records gameplay automatically when a game starts. Users will be able to choose how much hard drive space to dedicate to this option, with older footage being overwritten as time goes on. The second is “record on demand,” which will only record when a user hits a hotkey, giving gamers manual control over the recording. These manual recordings are automatically saved as clips.

Steam will also be getting what Valve calls a Steam Timeline that is displayed whenever a player is actively recording. Games that are enhanced to support this timeline feature will generate event markers whenever important moments happen. Markers are also created during Steam achievements and screenshots. Moreover, users can add a marker themselves whenever they want to for use later. The “highlight viewer” is there to make it easy to navigate the timeline.


Steam is also going to make sharing all these moments as easy as possible by letting users export timeline optimized footage as MP4 files. Players can save clips directly to their device, transfer it to another device, use the Steam Mobile App or QR Code to send clips, or create temporary Steam links to a video. Pretty neat, if you ask us.

Best of all is that Valve is claiming that there will be a minimal hit to performance while using the feature. The company says that “it takes advantage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards to remove most of the performance cost of creating video recordings.” However, systems without these graphics options might struggle.

Game Recording seems like a nice new feature to have as players enjoy sharing fun moments with friends. If all goes well during the beta period it should roll out to the rest of the user base.