Our guide to getting your game footage off your Steam Deck easily.
Valve's long-awaited Steam Game Recording feature is now here, out of beta and available to all. It allows you to quickly share clips of any epic moments, grab footage from an extended gameplay session, or record a quick how-to for a pal.
Chris Brandrick
We've taken the new built-in feature for a quick spin, and here's what you need to know to get things working on the Steam Deck.
Guide: Capture game video footage on Steam Deck
- First, check that your Steam Deck is up to date.
- If not, tap the Steam button and head into the Settings > System
- Under Software Updates download the latest Stable build
- Restart your Steam Deck
- Once downloaded and restarted you may have to apply the update and restart once more
- If you're up to date you should now see a new 'Game Recording' section in the left-hand sidebar of the Settings menu
- This screen should show you three options:
- Recording Off — This is the default, Steam will not record your gameplay.
- Record in Background — When you open a game, Steam automatically records your gameplay. You can tweak how this works.
- Record Manually — Steam will only record your gameplay when you instruct it to.
- Select which option works best for you, and you're good to go!
I'd suggest maybe starting with going for the manual route when using this feature on Steam Deck, as this method is not likely to impact performance as much as the continuous background option and of course is more considerate of your storage capacity. The Settings in Steam present a few ways to use this manual mode, including setting a custom shortcut for starting and stopping the recording of a clip. By default, it's set to the Steam + A button.
Tapping Steam + A will start recording footage, whilst recording you can tap Steam + Y at any time to set a marker (if something particularly cool happens and you want to be able to quickly find it later on the timelines for example). You can then end the recording by pressing Steam + A again.
Any clips you record can then be found in the Steam overlay, where you can see all videos made in the game you are currently running. All clips can also be found in the Media menu on your Steam Deck.
A quick video I recorded to test the feature
Once you've got your clips, you can easily trim them, and share them — either via sending them to another device (including your smartphone), or via a QR code 'Share Link' which will upload your clip to Steam's servers where it will stay for a couple of days, giving you time to grab it, download it, share it, etc.
Pretty easy stuff. Smartly integrated. I like it!