It’s interesting, to say the least, that Steam, one of the most important platforms in the world of PC gaming, streaming, and video game content creation, doesn’t have a game recorder. Players had to use external software such as NVIDIA recorder or another alternative. But that’s over because yes, Steam finally has a recorder.

It took a while but it’s here and what’s more, it comes with a pretty interesting twist.

How to activate. Steam Recorder was announced on June 27, when it was released in beta. Valve hasn’t decided to launch it for all users until now, almost in mid-November. To enable it, go to Steam > Settings > Game Recording (or use the UI) and enable recording. It can run in the background and has some pretty cool features.

It just doesn’t record. Anyone who has recorded games or videos in general knows that it is not easy to edit a video by taking the best parts. You have to more or less remember when it happened, cut it off, etc. must. Steam Recorder makes it easy by allowing the user to add time markers so they can quickly trim the clip using the built-in trimming tools.

Not only that, games that use the Steam Timeline (this is up to the developers) will be able to add markers automatically. For example, a loss, a death, a success, defeating a boss, etc. Similarly, games can control the appearance of the timeline, so you can view the menu, loading screen, waiting room, etc. You can easily distinguish the parts you see.

This is what Steam recorder looks like | Image: Valve

More options. Managing saves can be a bit chaotic, especially if you have a lot of saves across different games and contexts. Again, thanks to the implementation of the Steam Timeline, games can add tags and attributes to recordings, so the player can find what they are looking for faster. Valve gives a very good example: finding a particular ‘DOTA 2’ game by searching for the name of the hero we are playing. Very useful.

It’s also worth noting that we can structure recordings to last X amount of time, take up X amount of space, and/or be made of one quality or another depending on the game. In this sense, the recorder uses the capabilities of NVIDIA and AMD graphics so as not to affect performance, but a significant loss is possible on older models or less advanced computers that are more CPU-dependent.

This is what the markers added by games using the Steam Timeline look like | Image: Xataka

Compatibility. The recorder is compatible with all Steam games and, more importantly, all games compatible with the Steam interface interface. Also available on Steam Deck. However, getting the most out of its features will depend on developers implementing the Steam Timeline in their games.

More information | valve

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