Valve is adding a native gameplay recording tool to Steam so that you can more easily capture and share clips. The game recording feature is available now in beta — including on Steam Deck.
You’ll be able to both continuously record clips with background recording or manually turn on recording with a hotkey, according to Valve’s website about the updates. When you’re recording, you’ll see the “Steam Timeline,” and you can add markers to note interesting moments you might want to come back to later. Developers can also have their games mark notable moments on the timeline, which Valve has already implemented with Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2.
The tool won’t record your desktop, and you can pick which audio channels are included in the recording. To share your clips, Valve will offer a number of options: exporting a clip to MP4; sending the clip to the Steam mobile app; or even creating a temporary link.
As for how the tool might affect your computer’s performance, here’s what Valve has to say:
Steam Game Recording has been designed with the goal of taking as little computer resources away from the game you are playing as possible. 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 system’s CPU is used to create video recordings which may cause a noticeable performance impact on those systems.
Valve promises that more features are in the works for game recording, too, such as individualized game settings.
Earlier this year, Valve launched another big upgrade to Steam: an overhauled family sharing system.
