- Steam Game Recording is now in beta and available to everyone
- Automatically records the last 120 minutes of gameplay
- This feature leverages the video encoding capabilities of AMD and Nvidia GPUs
Recent Steam Families Update has proven to be beneficial to many PC gamers, and Valve has taken another step in the right direction with the Steam Game Recording feature, which has moved out of beta and is now available to all users.
This fresh innovation allows Steam players to have their gameplay automatically recorded for titles that support the platform’s overlay feature. How VideoKardz reports, when set to “Background Recording” mode, captures the last 120 minutes of gameplay (temporarily, in case you need it). Alternatively, you can initiate a manual “On Demand Recording” and start and stop recording yourself.
Game Recording also allows game developers to connect to the official API, so they can implement the ability to add tags for specific events in the recording (such as during a boss battle) to support you better navigate through recorded footage and find what you want.
This could be a game-changer (literally) for many content creators, offering the convenience of running both the game and recording features seamlessly on Steam.
That said, it’s significant to remember that running Game Recording can significantly impact gaming performance (particularly on portable gaming PCs or lower-end desktop setups), but there are options for both lower-quality recordings that can support mitigate any potential dips performance.
Game recording will employ the video encoding of your AMD or Nvidia GPU if you have one, or will rely on the CPU if your PC doesn’t have graphics capabilities. In the latter case, as you can imagine, this will likely cause greater performance problems.
Possible Steam streaming integration dream team?
While Steam’s game recording feature is a significant improvement for all users of the platform, Valve has not yet implemented any streaming features. Attention Studio and StreamLabs allow you to manually record and stream, which is perfect for social media platforms like YouTube and Twitch.
Fortunately, Game Recording on Steam has a variety of bitrates to choose from in its video settings (as well as low and high presets) – if you’ve only used the above-mentioned streaming platforms for manual recording, you can switch to Steam without too much worry. More broadly, this is a significant step towards enabling huge number of PC gamers using Steam for simple access to game recording directly on the Valve platform, without having to install anything else.
If Valve is able to integrate streaming services into Steam and possibly improve streaming directly to friends, we could very well be looking at some fresh competition in this particular aspect of the gaming arena (against Discord as well).
