Steam’s Game Recording function has come out of beta and is now available to everyone on Mac, PC and Steam Deck, Valve announced. It provides a native tool to record gaming sessions and also offers basic editing tools to trim clips. Users can either run it in the background or manually start or stop recording. On top of that, there’s a replay option that lets you quickly review recent recordings. You can then add markers for key moments, and if the game supports Game Recording’s Timeline feature, Steam will add its own markers.
The new feature negates the need for third-party recorders or apps from NVIDIA and AMD. Since the tool was first unveiled in June 2024, several games have provided official support with Timeline and event markers, most notably Valve’s own Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2. Third-party developers can also implement the features using Valve’s SDK.
Valve says that that the feature will minimize the use of your resources, unless your system lacks a GPU.
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.
Clips can be exported as MP4 files, sent to other devices, shared to mobile via QR code or shared via temporary link anyone on Steam can view. To get the new feature, you’ll need to update Steam. Then, head to the Game Recording section in settings and turn the feature on. Note that it’s available on Windows 10/11 and MacOS 10.13 or 10.14.
