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How to Record Your Game Session Directly on Steam

By oh nyo!

A quick and easy-to-follow guide explaining the most important parts of Steam's beta Record feature.

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Created by

oh nyo!
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Languages: English

Tags: Steam, Edit, Record, Video, Game recording, Clip, Share

Posted

Updated

26 Jun, 2024 @ 10:48pm

30 Jun, 2024 @ 10:20am

937	Unique Visitors
17	Current Favorites

Guide Index

Overview

Introduction

How to Enable Recording on Steam

Customize it

Record

Edit & Upload

View

Steam's official showcasing

Conclusion

Comments

Introduction

Steam announced an exciting new feature: Record clips of your gameplay of any game you play on the Steam client. You can also record your whole session if you prefer. You then can edit this clip and even share it.

My guide explains what you need to do to get started and how to do it.

How to Enable Recording on Steam

You need to do two things to get started.

Detailed Instructions

Step 1: Enable Steam Beta

1. Launch your Steam client.
2. From the client menu top-left, go to Steam > Settings
3. From the Settings window, go to the Interface tab.
4. From the Client Beta Participation drop-down menu, choose Steam Beta Update or Steam Families Beta. Both do the trick.

Step 2: Activate the Record feature

1. From the Settings window, go to the Game Recording tab. This is what we see by default.

2. To finally activate the new feature, choose either Record in background or Record on Demand.

Needless to say, the difference is that

Record in background saves your whole gaming session from the moment you launch the game.
Record on Demand starts saving your gameplay only manually when you tell it to and you need to stop it yourself as well.

It's up to you of course.
Personally, I prefer Record on Demand for several reasons.

Make sure to allow your Steam client to update

Otherwise, this new feature might not show for you.

Customize it

Now that you enabled the new beta feature, it's time to make using it easy and convenient for you.

Choose which key to start/stop your Record on demand

Choose your recording quality

Choose where to save your raw videos on your hard drive

Choose whether to include your own voice/commentary in your recorded clip

Choose whether to include audio from a different source in your recorded clip

Record

Press CTRL+F11 to start recording your session.
Press CTRL+F11 again to stop recording.

Edit & Upload

You can do so immediately when you record them or later.
While playing your game, bring up the Steam overlay.
You may notice that there's a new icon for Game Recording.
Clicking on it does not start recording your session. It only highlights the shortcut key you need to press to actually start/stop recording (CTRL+F11 by default).

Instead, go to the Screenshots tab, which is now titled Recordings & Screenshots

Choose your recorded clip.
You can now do some rudimentary editing on it, basically clip it using two scissor icons.
Note that it's best to keep your clips under 1 minute. Longer than that, and you won't get a share link for it automatically generated by Steam.

View

In the Steam client, choose View > Recordings & Screenshots

You can now see your clips.

You can also find them in the Steam library page of the specific game you played and recorded a clip of.

Steam's official showcasing

If you want to see what Steam has said about this, check their official showcasing of the Record feature here.

Conclusion

This is a long-time-coming feature and I feel a lot of us are glad it's finally available on Steam.

I hope my guide helped in even the smallest way. Please feel free to suggest additions or ask questions. I'll update this if there are some major changes or noteworthy additions.

Time to record and share your clips! Have fun!

12 Comments

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oh nyo! [author] 4 Sep, 2024 @ 1:09pm

Thanks for dropping by :)
I checked just now and recorded several clips. It's working perfectly fine for me.
Here's one, which I uploaded to YouTube. https://youtu.be/b5_ZigeTDT4

Maybe try changing your Record shortcut to a single key. That eliminates any doubt whether we hit the correct keys to start / stop the recording.

dankomancer 2 Sep, 2024 @ 6:55am

it doesn't seem to work :(
"no video recording is available" even though it shows a recording icon

CheshireCatMoonSmile 30 Jun, 2024 @ 10:50am

Thanks for checking for me! I really love to start having some content under the videos tab on my profile that would be nice

oh nyo! [author] 30 Jun, 2024 @ 10:10am

@Plutonic, Thanks!

@Cheshire, I hope so. The feature is still in beta and will likely have a few changes happen along the way.

I tested it just now by saving a short clip and seeing where I can access it from afterwards.
Here's the link steam generated for me. https://steamusercontent-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2500142617292448676/FE577F6711E0CFC6DBA6BD3D5AD1081F65CA08D3/

If you check my profile now, you can see that the clip isn't placed under anything public, neither on my profile nor under the Screenshots category, which is still called that without the Recordings bit. My guess is because the feature is still in beta while these are established in Steam's public layout.

In any case, we can suggest this to Steam and hope they listen.

CheshireCatMoonSmile 30 Jun, 2024 @ 9:17am

Do you think they will allow the videos you make to show up under the videos category on your profile eventually?