Steam Deck gets a built-in game recorder

While there’s a bunch of third-party apps and services you can use to record your Steam games, you now have a native option that’s built right into the Steam client. Valve has launched its own game recorder in beta, and yes, it also serves as a native recorder on the Steam Deck. You can either set the feature to start recording in the background the moment you keep playing or set it to only start (and stop) recording when you press a hotkey. If you choose to record in the background, you can specify the maximum of amount of storage recordings can take. Steam will overwrite old recordings once you hit the limit.

A Replay capability will allow you to watch previous footage in the Steam Overlay, so you can see what you did wrong in case you lose a boss fight or take a wrong turn that gets you lost. You can even drop markers beforehand to make it easy to find clips you think you’d want to watch later. The new feature also makes it easy to send clips from your Steam Deck to your PC or mobile device if you want to share them with friends or to upload them online.

Valve says the feature will only capture footage of your games and not your desktop, but it can include audio from voice chat programs. It will also work for most games, even non-Steam titles, as long as they support Steam Overlay. Since the feature is still in beta, though, you’ll have to join a beta program to be able to access it. Go to Beta Participation in Interface under Settings to choose a beta program and then activate the Game Recording option that shows up in the Settings menu.