Valve has a habit of dropping new features from basically nowhere, and todays reveal shows that they have been super charging the Steam capture tools to do a great deal more than just snare screenshots.
Launching today, The Steam Game Recording Beta is a new built-in system for creating and sharing your gameplay footage that works on any game on Steam.
Today we’ve launched Steam Game Recording into Beta. This is a new built-in system for creating and sharing your gameplay footage, that works on any game on Steam.
— Steam (@Steam) June 26, 2024
Learn more here: https://t.co/H5z6Reykmx pic.twitter.com/koDAjyUeAe
Working alongside the usual Steam overlay, the Game Recording Beta tools appear to have cribbed the best features of other recording tools, as well as a sprinkling of their own nifty innovation to make the whole “capture, edit and share” ecosystem as familiar as those who have grown used to their consoles doing a similar magic trick.
Detailed on a new dedicated introduction page, the features are vast and varied:
- With Background Recording mode, your gameplay is continuously saved to your preferred drive, never exceeding your specified duration and storage limits. An On Demand Recording mode with manual start and stop is also available.
- Keep only the video that matters to you. Steam offers lightweight tools to make it easy to find and clip your gameplay footage.
- Get your videos where you want them. One-click share to a friend in chat or post your finest moments for the world to see. Plus easily send footage from your Steam Deck to your PC or mobile device.
Mirroring the amazing “capture recent gameplay” offering present in other similar tools was a must, so it is awesome to see it front and centre.
Probably the most unique aspect of the Game Recording feature for Steam is the Steam Timeline. Appearing as an option for Timeline-enhanced games, event markers will generate as a visual timeline mark as relevant game events happen. Steam achievements and screenshots automatically create markers as well. These can also be manipulated manually, so you can create chapter marks to events that happened during your gameplay – as well as highlighting specific game experiences, such as time spent in a menu or playing. A neat way to curate what you are showing others.
Another exciting detail is the breakdown of recording permission details, with the following mentions:
When enabled by the user, Steam Game Recording will capture your gameplay footage of games played through the Steam Client. It will not capture video of your desktop or other programs. You can choose to include the audio from other programs, such as voice chat programs.
Music to my ears – but not to those viewing your video. There is a particularly thin line that can be crossed when it comes to other noises coming from your PC, so having some tools to opt-in to grab your personal Discord conversations is awesome.
Of course, many will immediately panic that this is going to dumpster their performance, and this is addressed 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. It takes advantage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards to remove most of the performance cost of creating video recordings.
So essentially it will cause no more issue than if you were using an existing video capture tool. Given that the tool is in beta, it also means that in its current form you can only opt in to using it – so perhaps it can also be toggled entirely off when it is a baseline feature. There is even the very real possibility that the method to add the Steam overlay to non-Steam games might work to help you capture those as well.
For those that have likely grown tired of the headaches that come from some third-party tools, this may well be a saviour to hopefully get something that works the way it is described, first time every time. And for people that may have never tooled around with capturing their gameplay, this might be a fun opportunity to start sharing your best moments – particularly if it is as easy as pressing a single button. I know I will be checking it out, if only to free myself from the constant hidden updates to Nvidia Shadowplay that cause it to turn off without my knowledge. Grumble.
What do you think of Steam Game Recording? Are you going to give the Beta a try? Let us know in the comments or on social media.
Known throughout the interwebs simply as M0D3Rn, Ash is bad at video games. An old guard gamer who suffers from being generally opinionated, it comes as no surprise that he is both brutally loyal and yet, fiercely whimsical about all things electronic. On occasion will make a youtube video that actually gets views. Follow him on YouTube @Bad at Video Games
