Steam Game Recording is now up and running, out of beta

In what is a surprisingly short turnover for a big new feature, Valve has just pushed Steam Game Recording out of beta. Game Recording was released in beta form in late June, offering a comprehensive set of in-game capture tools, and now you can give it a shot in stable.

Steam Game Recording is a one-stop-shop for the recording of gameplay footage. Though it’s obviously not nearly as powerful as dedicated videography applications, such as Adobe Premiere, Game Recording has proven to be more than good enough for snap-shot video capture and subsequent publication. It’s also extremely lightweight and user-friendly, while the same cannot necessarily be said about mainstream video editing alternatives. Most notably, Game Recording received a bevy of user-suggested upgrades during its beta stint, making it even more useful than the original June version.

Give Steam Game Recording a shot, now that it’s available in full

As per Valve’s recent announcement, Steam Game Recording is now running as a built-in feature of the stable build of Steam proper. Compared to its earlier June build, Game Recording now also comes with all of the following improvements:

• Game-specific recording settings.
• Quick capture hotkey options.
• Ability to tweak export settings.
• Session View functionality, allowing users to easily access and view previous footage in the Recordings & Screenshots media manager (full support for game tags and metadata included).

Mostly quality-of-life goodies, to be sure, but Game Recording was a fairly powerful baseline video capture tool right off the bat. Besides, taking on user feedback is always a good idea.

For those who haven’t yet had the chance to try Game Recording, it’s a background capture tool that doesn’t rear its head unless you pull it up. It comes with a reasonably streamlined editor allowing users to cut, save, and lightly tweak specific portions of gameplay. Sharing videos, too, is made easy and straightforward. Honestly, even if you’re totally unfamiliar with video software, figuring out Steam Game Recording is easy as pie.

Now, something to keep in mind is that some users have reported substantial performance drops while using Game Recording, though those don’t appear to be universal. Even on the Steam Deck, it seems to work just fine unless you’re pushing the device very hard. As with most other Valve software solutions, though, I expect improvements to continue pouring in for the foreseeable future.