Hands-on: Steam’s game recording beta is already incredible

Recording your video game sessions isn’t exactly a new idea. It’s the entire basis of Twitch and its countless game streamers, both professional and aspirational. But game streaming requires a collection of special tools and techniques if you want to stand out.

Or, at least, it used to. Now, with its latest beta update, Steam will basically do it all for you. Steam has long been able to take screenshots and stream game sessions around a local network, but this new feature is laser-focused on recording and sharing your experiences.

With Nvidia’s Shadowplay now on the outs, this new one by Steam is probably the tool that’s most likely to be installed on gamers’ PCs already (or it will be once it moves from beta to full release). This should make Steam the most prolific game recording software in the world, even before most users are aware of the capability.

I tried out the tool with a few sessions of Hades II and found it remarkable how well the tool runs without even thinking about it.

Set it up to work in the background—shaving a bit of performance off your GPU, but not anything I particularly noticed—and your game sessions will just appear in your recordings and screenshots folder. (You can always navigate to the non-DRM files in Windows Explorer, but Steam includes a video player within its own interface, too.)

From this view, you can clip and export sections of your session, grab a screenshot, or send it to other PCs or even your phone, all without leaving the player window.

Here’s a quick snippet I grabbed in just a few seconds with no editing. Note how the tool preserves my ultrawide monitor’s 21:9 aspect ratio, something a lot of similar software struggle to do.

By default, Steam saves sessions in 120-minute chunks and at 12Mbps video (which was about the level of a YouTube stream for me), and it asks just under 11GB of space to keep the buffer running.

Naturally, all of that is adjustable within the Game Recording menu, as are the shortcuts to add specific markers. You can even bind a shortcut to a controller button—those back-mounted “paddle” buttons showing up on more and more gamepads seem like a perfect fit here.

Valve says that game developers will be able to automatically add markers and snippet sections to these recording sessions at some point, though I’m not seeing them at the moment. Other features include an easy-to-share QR code link generator and temporary links for “Hey, look at this!” shares with your friends. Oh, and it works on the Steam Deck.

All of this reminds me of the social tools baked into the PlayStation and Xbox, but with more options available for modern tech-savvy users. Valve’s continual work to make Steam the de facto platform for PC gaming seems to be paying off.

You can try out the tool by enabling the Steam beta and then checking out the Game Recording tab in the Steam Settings menu.