After spending some time testing the feature in the Steam Beta client, Valve has finally made native recording via the Steam game overlay public in the mainline Steam client. In the latest Steam client update, which landed on November 5, game recording finally went live for all versions of Steam. While the new feature is undoubtedly helpful for gamers on all platforms, it's particularly useful for Linux and Steam Deck gamers, who have, until now, had to rely on myriad third-party software, which can be a hassle to set up and present additional overhead that may cause issues in games.

Similar to the likes of NVIDIA's GeForce Experience (soon to be replaced by the NVIDIA App) and AMD's Adrenaline Software, Steam offers a number of different options to record entire sessions or just short gameplay clips. Unsurprisingly, Steam game recording works with the Steam Deck (and thus many other Linux distributions), but perhaps not as expected is that it also works with non-Steam games that allow the Steam overlay to work. Valve also put some thought into the technical side of things, with optimizations to minimize CPU usage and rely on NVIDIA and AMD GPU video encoding wherever possible. This should minimize any performance impacts and increase power efficiency where applicable—as in the case of gaming handhelds. Valve does note that non-AMD and -NVIDIA GPUs may see significant performance impacts, which is not great news for Intel Xe owners.Record, as the name suggests, is a basic gameplay recording feature that gamers can enable, both manually from the overlay or as in "Background Recording" mode, which always saves a predetermined amount of gameplay footage to a selected file, ready for a shortcut to retroactively save the footage.

"Replay" is a way to quickly go back and check the previously recorded footage directly in the Steam Overlay. Replay could conceivably prove useful for remembering an enemy's attack patterns, figuring out where to go in something like an RPG, or just having a laugh at the goofy NPC animations or bugs that have become all too common in modern games.

Clip and Share, on the other hand, are neat usability features that make it easy for users to edit and share their game recordings right in Steam. These features seem like they were specifically designed for the Steam Deck, which is primarily a handheld device that can become rather cumbersome to navigate outside the Steam interface.

Steam's game recording features also include nifty markers and indicators for things like highlights and game modes or states—when players are in a lobby or in a match, for example—to make clips and recordings easier to navigate and edit. The settings page for Steam game recording also allows users to customize clip length, storage limits, and recording modes on a per-game basis.