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Valve rolls out Steam background recording and sharing into beta

Valve rolls out Steam background recording and sharing into beta

PC games giant Valve has introduced a new feature on Steam. 

As spotted by Eurogamer, the firm is introducing Game Recording into beta; Background Recording mode allows players to save footage to their storage option of choice, while the manual On Demand Recording can be easily switched on and off. There's also a Replay mode, which lets gamers have a little look back at what went wrong just now – Valve uses Elden Ring as the visual example of this one, which is a pretty fair representation. 

The Game Recording functionality also lets you Clip the specific parts of footage that you want to have record of, while the Share option lets you, er, share footage with your friends. 

While recording, the Steam Timeline appears; this allows games where this functionality is enabled to flag when game events occur. 

The above functionality is already available in beta for gamers. For developers, Valve says that integration is simple via an SDK and API that is available right now. 

Valve has said that this functuionality has been designed to be as light on resources as possible. 

"Steam Game Recording has been designed with the goal of taking as little computer resources away from the game you are playing as possible," the company wrote. 

"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." 


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.