Steam just quietly dropped what might be one of the most impressive built-in recording solutions on any current gaming platform with its Game Recording feature, which is now in beta.
Steam Game Recording functions in a fairly similar manner to what you’d see on the PS5 or Xbox Series X|S, allowing you to manually stop and start recordings as you’d expect but also automatically capturing footage of your gameplay in the background so that you can quickly grab a recent moment or chunk of gameplay when it happens.
The magic of Steam’s version is in how flexible it is, and some pretty neat extra features to make editing and sharing it even easier. One of the first interesting embellishments is a Replay function, which basically just lets you very quickly watch back the last few moments of gameplay without leaving your game – which Steam says is handy for seeing how you died or going back to a bit of a conversation you might have missed.
More exciting though are Event Markers, which you can add to your recording timeline to refer back to later when you want to start cutting clips or can be automatically added to the game based on certain events. Essentially, developers can proactively set moments or milestones in their games on Steam which will automatically add a marker to your recording timeline so that you know something interesting has happened there, which is actually pretty cool – and hopefully supported by more developers than just Valve and its partners.
To make it extra easy to share or bring these clips across to your favourite editing software, you can easily export your recordings to your PC, send them to your mobile via the Steam mobile app or a QR code or even create a temporary link to the video to send anywhere in a message.
Excitingly, Steam Game Recording also works on Steam Deck, and you’re able to let Steam know how much recording time to allow each game and what recording bitrate to use, with the software giving you an estimate of how much storage space that’ll take up.
You can find out more about Steam Game Recording here (or just use it for yourself right now!)