Steam announces game recording beta.

Steams custom controller profiles alone used on Steam Deck are killers for me. Nothing else amounts.

GOG has DRM for many titles: see Galaxy. As I understand it, it isn't as pervasive as Steam, but is necessary if you want multiplayer on many titles or care about extras like achievements.

not just features for the average consumer, but also a plethora of tools for developers. But then you'll see some airhead keep saying about the 30% cut that steam takes.

The fact that Epic Game Store exists at all is proof that Steam isn't a monopoly. A monopoly means they're the only option. Steam is not the only option. It is simply the best option.

Steam does have a monopoly though. They don't do anything anti-competitive with it, so there is not much Epic can do about it (other than make their platform better for the people using it).

I imagine they made this specifically for Steam Deck, since windows users already have stuff like this built into GPU software. They'd want to offer feature parity on their handheld, so it'll probably work nicely out of the box.

Now there's a bit of software I haven't thought about in a long time

it pisses me off to this day what we lost. That platform was, apparently, 15 years ahead of its time. I remember streaming gameplay to my friends. We seriously lost so much when it died.

I miss xfire too.

So that's what happened to them

What happened to them? They were sued? I miss x-fire too.

Maybe?

The page says it captures game audio only by default. But you can switch it to all audio if UPI want to capture something like external voice chat.

Currently it cannot. It does let you select which applications it records from though (ex: I have it set to record my game audio, discord, and my microphone, but not Spotify).

To be honest, OBS is way more advanced than a screen recording tool. It's basically a live program director

There are two factors.

First is simply the convenience of having it all built in to the gaming platform you're using instead of juggling other software. Plus Steam will host content you want to share for you, which neither AMD nor Nvidia does. Also, neither AMD nor Nvidia's offering providers a two hour rolling recording that you can just skim through and pick clips from at your leisure.

Second is the hope for better reliability. Shadowplay/replay/whatever nvidia is calling it now just stops working at random for a lot of people, myself included, with no warning or indication until you hit the "save replay" button and get a popup telling you that its not running. I also wrestled for a while with it recording the wrong screen when I had two monitors, so I'd just get clips of my second monitor desktop with the audio of the game. There are lots of people hoping that Steam will manage better.

Many are, yes. But for some like me who play via cloud streaming where at least Nvidia stops that function, it's a great thing. It's also nice to have it all in one place, most people already use Steams screenshot function so having this too is just nice. This has been a commonly requested feature for a long time, it's only weird that it has taken so long for it to exist.

No but I fucking hate geforce experience and the fact that I need to have an Nvidia account to use the features of my hardware. Now I can remove that garbage app from my pc, thanks Valve.