Valve unveils Steam Game Recording, letting players capture, edit, and share gaming clips

PC gamers using Steam can now opt-in to use a built-in system to create clips of their gaming experiences. Simply dubbed Game Recording, a beta version of the feature has just been released, and it lets players record, quickly watch recent events, edit any relevant bits, and even share the clips with their friends straight from the Steam client.

The Background Recording function will continuously save footage when a game is running, and players can choose the duration and storage size it can use. Standard recording with manual start and stop options are available too.

Meanwhile, the Replay ability lets players quickly scrub through their most recent recordings instantly straight from the Steam Overlay. Valve has also brought in simple and lightweight editing tools to clip recorded footage via the Recordings & Screenshots interface on the client and then share it with friends via chat or elsewhere as an MP4 video.

When recording, Steam Game Recording will also be putting handy markers onto the aforementioned editing tools for events like Steam achievements and screenshots for easier clipping. This feature is named The Steam Timeline. However, on "Timeline-enhanced" titles like DOTA 2, the game itself will add relevant markers for events chosen by the developer, like kills or time spent in the lobby.

Valve is also offering third-party developers the tools to implement the Timeline-enhanced feature set into their games too.

As for what kind of performance loss can players expect when using Steam Game Recording, Valve said this:

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 systems CPU is used to create video recordings which may cause a noticeable performance impact on those systems.

The feature even supports the Steam Deck, letting players capture and share footage straight from the popular handheld gaming device.

The Steam Game Recording feature is now available to Steam Beta client users. To join, Steam users can head to Settings > Interface > Beta Participation and select any of the options available. Valve is looking for feedback via the Steam forums here.