Despite offering a treasure trove of features not found on most other platforms, Steam didn't let you record your gameplay. That changes now as Valve has finally announced a native gameplay recorder for Steam. Currently, it is in beta and will only be available to users on the beta Steam client. On selected titles, the timeline automatically identifies and marks important events. For now this is only available in DOTA2 and Counter-Strike 2, but developers can add it to their titles via an API.

By default, the recording functionality is disabled in Steam. To enable it, head over to settings, and you'll find a new "Game Recording" tab. From here, you can pick between background recording or record on demand by pressing Ctrl F11. Background recording, as its name suggests, will automatically record everything you play until the recording hits a certain size on your hard drive.

You can also customize your recording quality, with 1.5 Mbps being the lowest and 24 Mbps being the highest. Similarly, you can also determine which audio gets recorded. By default, only the game audio gets captured but you can tweak the settings to include your microphone. All your recordings will be saved in your default Steam folder; otherwise, you can access it directly from the new 'Recordings & Screenshots' tab (under 'View') in the Steam client

Players can segment timelines on recorded videos, create clips, highlights and share it with others via a QR code. And yes, the feature is also available on the Steam Deck. If you want to try the feature out for yourself, get the beta version of Steam by heading over to Settings> Interface> Client Beta Participation> Steam Beta/Families Update. After that you'll have to restart your client.