Steam Now Has a Built-in Game Recording Feature

Steam now has a built-in solution for recording game captures, and it’s also compatible with non-Steam titles. Game recording works on all platforms where Steam is available, and it’s also supported on Valve’s Steam Deck portable console.

It’s quite common for gamers today to record gameplay clips and share them online, and Windows 10 and Windows 11 already make it quite easy to take screenshot and record clips with the Xbox Game Bar. However, Steam offers more granular controls and offers other intuitive tools for editing and sharing this footage.

Game Recording should work with any game that supports the Steam Overlay. Users can choose to either have the app automatically record the last 120 minutes of gameplay in the background or manually decide when to start recording. It’s also possible to set up background recording settings by game.

Valve created the Steam Timeline, a feature designed to automatically highlight key moments alongside achievements and player-added markers. It’s up to game developers to add support for this timeline in their games, however.

“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,” Valve explained in an FAQ. On PCs without dedicated GPUs, the system’s CPU will be used to record gameplay, though in that case the impact on performance will be more perceptible.

Lastly, Steam’s new Recordings & Screenshots Manager offers intuitive tools for saving clips and sending them to a PC or Steam Deck users have recently signed in to. The app also offers the option to create a shareable link that expires after 2 days.

This new Game Recording feature can be turnon on by going to Settings > Game Recording. You can learn more details about how it works on this FAQ.