Steam's New Gameplay Recording System: Details and Features

Steam has unveiled its long-awaited built-in gameplay recording system, offering players the ability to easily record, save, and share their gaming moments. Every Steam user can now record their gaming sessions with several new features: Record, Replay, Clip, and Share. These features are designed to make the process of recording and sharing gameplay videos convenient and flexible.

The main feature of the system is Background recording, which allows you to continuously save the gameplay for a specified time on the selected disk, without exceeding the established volume limits. The mode is also available Recordings on demand, which allows you to manually start and stop recording. Built-in timestamps and event markers make it easy to find key moments, and recordings can be accessed and quickly played back via Steam Overlay.

Clips help to save only the important moments. Convenient tools allow users to quickly find and highlight the best fragments of gameplay, and then share them via chat or send to other devices. Videos can be converted to MP4 format and sent to mobile devices via the Steam Mobile app or via QR code.

Steam also offers Timeline and event markers, which are automatically created for important game events, such as earning achievements or taking screenshots. Users can add markers manually to mark key moments for later review. Game developers can integrate SDKs and APIs to customize the appearance of markers and control how the current game state is displayed on the timeline.

The new recording system is fully supported on Steam deck, making it accessible for portable gaming. Features are optimized to minimize CPU load, using integrated video encoding hardware from NVIDIA and AMD.