Steam Game Recording has officially launched

No longer should you need external software just to record a fun clip of gameplay on Steam desktop and Steam Deck, with Steam Game Recording now officially live for everyone. Arriving as part of a big update to the Steam Client there's a lot of changes, which also has Valve drop support for Windows 7 and 8.

This system enables you to have continuous recording of gameplay, or you can set it to record manually on a hotkey. From there you can then clip it easily directly in the Steam client to share anywhere. It works for any game, even non-Steam games you've added to your library.

It comes with a new SDK and API developers can hook into as well. If a game adds direct support they can add various special markers to the recording timeline.

Shipped as part of this update are some Steam Deck specific changes:

• Fixed games stored on an external drive still showing as available when the drive is removed.
• Changed the enter action on the login password entry to attempt login rather than requiring navigation to the "submit" button.
• Improve compatibility for native titles that have not been reviewed yet by launching them in the same runtime environment as reviewed titles.
• Fixed a case where the Bluetooth settings tab would disappear if the system was in sleep mode for an extended period of time and resumed without an internet connection.
• Fixed a case where controllers were unresponsive if a malfunctioning third party compatibility tool was installed.

And also various Linux improvements too:

• Fixed some miscellaneous common crashes.
• Fixed slow startup on systems where the reverse hostname lookup for the loopback interface is not localhost.
• Detecting and passing commands to an already running Steam client is significantly faster.
• Added a -disable-screensaver-inhibit command line option to prevent Steam from inhibiting the screen saver when activity is detected.
• Fixed Linux crash launching steamwebhelper occurring with some system configurations.
• Steam developers can now select which Steam for Linux runtime to use for native titles. Please consult the partner site for more details.
• Native titles will execute in 'Steam for Linux runtime 1.0 (scout)' by default, instead of the legacy runtime environment.
  This behavior is consistent with Steam Deck and promotes better compatibility across all Linux desktop distributions.
  Note that this new feature can be turned off globally with "-compat-force-slr off" on the Steam client command line.
• Always allow the Steam client to fallback to X11 when SDL_VIDEODRIVER/SDL_VIDERO_DRIVER is set to wayland.
• Removed the UI toggle to disable Steam Play globally, correctly reflecting that Steam Play is always enabled on Linux. Steam Play was always partially active even when set to off in the UI as it is a requirement for Steam client operation.
• Fixed a case where the wrong DPI scaling factor would be used for systems using a non-gnome based session with an active gnome-desktop-portal service.
• Extended recent Steam Play fixes to third party compatibility tools.

See more on the Game Recording page. And the changelogs for Desktop / Steam Deck.