Steam announces game recording beta.

It's hilarious to me that Epic will never introduce features like this, and also complain Steam has a monopoly, as if they're at all comparable

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.
- But how does the EGS exist?
  
  Because they are able to subsidize it with investor as well as Fortnite money. I doubt it's turned a profit for them.
  
  Wouldn't exactly call that "viable competition"
- No it doesn’t
  
  A company can be a monopoly when they include so many features that new competition can’t compete
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).
- Steam does not have a monopoly by any actual definition of monopoly, though. A) Mobile gaming makes up the most of all video gaming revenue. B) On PC the most revenue is made by games that aren't even on Steam in the first place (Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox). Steam's 2023 revenue has been estimated to be around 8.6bn USD out of 45bn USD of PC gaming revenue. That's barely a 5th of the market power. By no account this can be actually considered to be a monopoly.
- Just for the sake of being fair, Steam does do one thing which is anticompetitive; they require publishers don't sell their games for less than they do on Steam.
  
  If you think about this for a moment you'll realise it's in the publisher's best interest to agree to this.

This is why Steam is as popular as it is, they just release features that people like. Sure GOG doesn't have DRM and Epic Games gives a bigger share to developers but Steam gives players what they actually want.

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.
- Having developers pay a one time fee for dedicated servers that the players don't need to pay for is amazing.
Steams custom controller profiles alone used on Steam Deck are killers for me. Nothing else amounts.
- Steaminput is a massive deal, it supports gyro, remapping, profiles, and extensive customization. XInput can't compare and the epic games store relies on developers for everything. That's the reason why I will always pick a Steam Controller over an Xbox controller.
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.
- Achievements or multiplayer matching not being implemented in the game itself isn't on GOG. They still allow you to download and launch any game you've bought, without even requiring galaxy.
  
  Also lesser known is the fact that there are DRM-free games on steam. Download them once, you can play without having steam running or even installed. Using a client to download isn't inherently DRM either.
- Cloud sync also requires the drm, but the advantage that gog and itch have over steam is that for most games you just get the executables and you're good to go.

If my screen recorder software doesn't put an "UNREGISTERED HYPERCAM 2" watermark at the top left corner, then I'm completely uninterested, smh

This is awesome. Steam continues to release great stuff

This is pretty great! I'm interested to see how the quality will compare with my OBS replay buffer settings. One of the best things is that it's coming to Steam Deck! Mostly excited to see how well this works on Linux.

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.

It'll almost be like having xFire again!

...I miss that software. IIRC they were bullshit-litigated out of existence.

Now there's a bit of software I haven't thought about in a long time
- IT WAS SO GOOD! It was better in like 2010 than shit like discord is today.
  
  Would be an incredible product today if it continued to receive development (w/o enshitification ofc).
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.
- Yeah, by Yahoo... fuckin assholes.

Excellent.

Any information on if this tool separates game audio from other applications?

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).

Awesome. OBS has never prioritized Linux performance, curious how this will compare.

To be honest, OBS is way more advanced than a screen recording tool. It's basically a live program director
- Yes. For simple screen recording there is Simple Screen Recorder.

I don't get it why people care so much about this, your AMD and Nvidia cards already did it for years, are they all deck users?

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.
- Shadow play automatically turns off when you open KeePass or Netflix, but it doesn't turn on again after you are done, very annoying yes.
  
  What will make or break steam's version is if it's so light that even people with weak hardware can record fine.
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.
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.
- As long as they don't charge me for hosting clips I guess it's fine.